UNEDITD Presents TOP PERSPECTIVES EDITION 09 · WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 7, 2026 MADDY VISWANATH · CRAFT YOUR CONFIDENCE |
Welcome back to Top Perspectives. Three stories this week, and they are the same story told three ways. |
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This week · one Uber cut 3,300 roles and shrank its manager layer by 20 percent On September 2, Dara Khosrowshahi told Uber staff in an internal email that the company is cutting about 3,300 roles, roughly 10 percent of global headcount. The stated aim is fewer management layers, and a company that moves simpler and faster. The manager population shrinks by 20 percent, and some of those managers stay at Uber as individual contributors. Remote work drops to 1 percent of employees. He did not attribute any of it to AI. |
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This week · two
Fidelity opened a new headquarters and ended hybrid the same week
Fidelity opened its new Boston headquarters in the Seaport the week of September 4, and ended hybrid work in the same stretch. All staff go in five days a week, roughly 6,200 people in Boston plus sites in New Hampshire, Kentucky and New Mexico. The reporting describes a building designed around in-person collaboration. Fidelity kept its old downtown tower as well, because the new one cannot hold everyone at once.
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This week · three
Bloomberg counted what is left, over the Labor Day weekend
On September 6 Bloomberg reported that pay gains have slowed to their weakest in more than five years, that employee confidence measured by Glassdoor hit a record low over the summer, and that promotions are declining while benefits get squeezed. Their framing of the year: quitting is not an option.
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| Maddy's read Read those three together and they stop being three stories. A company removed a layer. A company required attendance. A newspaper counted what is left, and what is left is fewer promotions and less pay. The part worth slowing down on is not the 3,300 who left Uber. It is the managers who stayed and became individual contributors. Same building, same badge, different scope, and a title that stopped meaning in September what it meant in August. Three minutes a name is what a talent review gives you, and nobody in that room opens the work. A layer gets counted on the same terms. What survives a count is whatever someone was able to write down about you before the meeting started, which is a much smaller thing than what you actually do.
The useful thing about a de-layering is that it is a legibility test, and it is run before anyone is told. When an organization decides how many managers it needs, somebody sits with a chart and asks what each one actually owns. The ones who survive are not the best liked and not always the best performing. They are the ones whose scope could be stated in a sentence by someone who has never worked with them. Attendance will not save that person and it never has. Being the person the chart can describe will. That is buildable, it is buildable now, and it is a great deal easier to build in September than during the meeting where the chart gets drawn. |
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A title can stop meaning what it meant in August without anyone announcing that it did.
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The move this week Four minutes. Open your own LinkedIn profile and read the first line of your current role the way a stranger holding a planning chart would read it. That line is the whole of what they have. Most of us wrote a title there and stopped. Add the thing you own and how big it is, this week, while the choice of words is still yours. |
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Tool of the week · The Readiness Score Somebody is going to describe you in one line this quarter, and they will do it without asking you first. You should probably know what that line says. The Readiness Score reads your LinkedIn profile the way a talent review reads it and hands back the version of you that arrives ahead of you, in about two minutes. |
See you next Monday. Maddy |
P.S. If you manage managers, this is the week to be able to say in one line what each of them owns. Start with the one you would fight hardest to keep. |
Craft Your Confidence |
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