Day: August 17, 2025

• Business Insider spoke with current and former CEOs about AT&T chief John Stankey’s viral memo to managers.
• They discussed the memo’s tone and the challenges of implementing cultural change at a big company.
• Former Medtronic CEO Bill George said he doesn’t believe workplace loyalty is dead — it’s just changing.

One business leader called AT&T CEO John Stankey’s memo “a bold statement.” Others praised the intent but critiqued the execution. Another suspected employee attrition was the desired result.

The viral memo — in which Stankey suggested that employees not on board with the company’s “dynamic, customer-facing business” could find new jobs — has generated plenty of feedback from readers.

So Business Insider decided to speak with other business leaders about what they thought. While their responses to Stankey’s 2,500-word memo to managers differed, the four current or former CEOs Business Insider spoke with had plenty of thoughts to share.

We asked for their take on Stankey’s message, tone, and what other senior executives could glean from the conversations his memo sparked about workplace loyalty.

A shifting employee-employer contract

Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic and executive education fellow at Harvard Business School, told Business Insider that AT&T was historically “one of the world’s most paternalistic firms,” and it rewarded loyalty.

The world has changed, George said, and Stankey was telling employees that “we live in a very competitive world, and we have to focus on our customers.”

The AT&T chief explicitly lays out the end of a now-dated workplace contract between white-collar employers and employees, Business Insider’s chief correspondent Aki Ito recently wrote.

“The days of lifetime job security and pensions are long gone,” said Ito. “But CEOs have rarely acknowledged the change, because they’ve gotten a lot of hard work out of their staff who still believe they’ll be taken care of in return. At least Stankey is clear: He won’t even pretend to be loyal to his workers.”

George said he doesn’t believe workplace loyalty is dead; the arrangement is simply changing.

“Companies should be loyal to performers, the people that are committed to the mission and the values of the company,” he said. “Should they be loyal to people that performed in the past but not in the present; that are complacent; that don’t want to come to work; that aren’t willing to put in the effort? No.”

For many Gen Z and millennial workers, the concept of workplace loyalty — on behalf of either companies or workers — may feel antiquated. After all, these generations have experienced waves of layoffs, economic uncertainty, political polarization, and a pandemic that upended traditional workplace norms, just as they were getting established in their careers.

Younger workers have “come of age in a time when nothing in the world could be counted on,” Jennifer Dulski, Rising Team CEO and founder, and management lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told Business Insider. “Being blindly loyal to anything doesn’t make sense.”

‘Direct, even blunt, communication’

The memo was “certainly a bold statement,” said Doug Dennerline, CEO of performance management platform Betterworks.

Dennerline, a former Cisco executive, said he thought the purpose of the memo was to intentionally reduce head count. “He’s expecting to get turnover from this, and must want it,” Dennerline told Business Insider.

Rising Team’s Dulski, a former Google and Yahoo executive, said she thought Stankey made it clear AT&T was listening to its employees by sharing the results of the company’s recent employee engagement survey. “They said, ‘We heard you,'” she said. “That is a good thing.”

Dulski said she would have opted for a different tone. The memo “starts from a place of lack of trust,” she said. Dulski worried that focusing so much on employees who weren’t aligned with the company’s mission risked “alienating everyone, including their best employees.”

George echoed some of Dulski’s concerns over tone. He said he thought the language used was “not at all thoughtful enough and empowering enough.”

Whether the memo was effective depends on Stankey’s goal, said James D. White, former CEO of Jamba Juice and coauthor of the forthcoming book “Culture Design.”

“Direct, even blunt, communication can move things forward if employees already feel heard and respected,” White wrote in an email to Business Insider. “If they don’t, a message this firm can risk disengagement.”

Creating cultural change at a legacy company

Creating a true cultural shift is challenging at such a big company, Dulski said. “It is hard, especially for large organizations, to do transformation at scale,” said Dulski. (Her organization, Rising Team, helps companies enact these sorts of cultural changes through its software tools.)

Of course, transformations don’t happen overnight in any company. A good next step, said George, would be for Stankey to tour AT&T offices around the country, meet with workers, and learn more about customer concerns.

“Have a dialogue with employees,” suggested George. “Be serious about the cultural change. Customer focus doesn’t come from the top. It can be guided from the top, but the customer focus is on one-to-one interactions.”

• I used to love making travel besties with people I’d just met but instantly connected with.
• While enjoyable, traveling with family can make that part more difficult, so I booked a solo trip.
• I spent 12 days in Nepal with eight other solo travelers, and it was one of my best trips ever.

Down-to-earth adventure seekers who are short on funds but high on energy and enthusiasm. Those are the best kind of people.

Back in my 20s, I went on yearly hiking trips with my two best friends. We hiked the Inca Trail, trekked in Patagonia, Chile, and went to Angel Falls in Venezuela. We had little money, but a high sense of adventure, so we booked inexpensive hiking tours to take us to our destinations. It was on those trips that we met the best people.

Fast forward 30 years. Here I am 53, married with two teenage boys. While I travel extensively with my family and love it, I miss those trips in my 20s where I didn’t have to worry about anyone but myself.

I also missed those “travel bestie” connections, when I instantly bonded with someone I’d just met, even though we might never see each other again. It’s like kids who meet at summer camp and form an intense and fabulous, albeit sometimes temporary, attachment. I loved my travel besties, whom I met on those long-ago hiking trips. We spent 24/7 together and laughed and bonded in a way that’s hard to duplicate when you’re traveling with family.

The nostalgia for those long-ago hiking trips made me think about taking a trip without the hubby and kids. Nepal has always been on my bucket list, so I started looking there. I wanted a solo trip, but I also wanted a built-in opportunity to meet new people, so I checked out solo tours from various tour operators and landed on G Adventures’ “Solo-ish Nepal” package.

I went during the off-season, when the tickets were more affordable — about $1,500 for 12 days — and I can honestly say it was one of my favorite trips ever.

It was a motley crew of travelers

My fellow solo travelers ranged from a 19-year-old college student from Sydney to a 64-year-old retired police officer. I quickly became best friends with an oncology nurse from Norway who was easily 20 years my junior. Adding to the mix was a geometry middle school teacher from the West Coast (who was hilarious and kept us laughing), a Fulbright scholar, an art teacher from New England, and a woman who worked at Trader Joe’s.

Four of us were older than 50, and four of us were younger, but the group didn’t divide by age; we all mingled together. One person even had a radically different political perspective than the rest of us, and I still adored her and didn’t talk politics.

It was July, the middle of Nepal’s monsoon season, when the eight of us met in Kathmandu on the first day of the trip. And yet, the rain and 90-degree heat didn’t deter the crazy amounts of fun we had.

One of the reasons I think the trip was such a success was because of the tour’s price point. It wasn’t luxury — it didn’t attract those looking for five-star accommodations and fancy experiences. Instead, it attracted those on a budget, who were used to rolling with the punches and pivoting when things didn’t go their way. It was similar to the vibe on my long-ago hiking trips in my 20s — exactly what I was hoping for.

We instantly bonded over momo

Our first day together was a cooking class making momos — a popular Nepali dish similar to a Chinese dumpling. I hate cooking, absolutely despise it. So, I wasn’t looking forward to this activity.

However, as my fellow travelers and I started opening up about our lives — who we were, why we decided on this trip to Nepal — the momo making was just something to keep our hands busy while we did the important work of getting to know each other.

The poor momo chef kept trying to interrupt our conversation to tell us the history of momos and how to perfect our momo-making skills, but the group had instantly bonded. Conversation took off immediately, and we were on our way to becoming instant travel besties on day one.

When we left our momo-making session, it was pouring rain outside, but we just laughed as we jumped through puddles and made our way back to the hotel. The tone of the trip was set.

We had countless adventures together and a minor hiccup

We started in Kathmandu, but every two nights we moved to a new city. That meant we had plenty of places to explore, plus plenty of van time for talking.

In Bhaktapur, we explored Durbar and Dattatreya Square. We hiked through the forest up to the top of Champa Devi, where we took in views of the Himalayan mountains and learned that Nepal is home to eight of the 10 tallest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest.

In Pharping, we visited religious landmarks at the Buddhist Asura Cave, Vajrayogini Temple, and Sheshnarayan Hindu Temple.

We then drove on to Royal Chitwan National Park, one of my favorite spots and favorite days of the trip. Our plan was to bike through a village and end up on the water for sunset, enjoying drinks and appetizers. It was notably hot that day, and one of my new travel besties told me later that she saw me sweating profusely and smiling manically while I kept saying, “I love this so much.” And I did.

Like any trip, there were hiccups along the way — we all took turns having traveler’s diarrhea (we pooled our Imodium and rehydration tablets) — but even the hiccups brought us together. We took turns making toilet paper runs to the front desk for our fellow travel companions.

Why it was one of the best trips I’ve ever had

When I returned and told my husband and kids what a great time I had, they kept asking why?

It was monsoon season (yes, it rained a lot), it was super hot and humid (yes, I sweated a lot), it was not a luxe trip (we couldn’t flush the toilet paper in the toilet, but instead had to throw it out in the trash can next to the toilet due to Nepal’s sensitive plumbing situation).

And yet, it was honestly one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. I got to go to my life-long bucket list destination, and I did it with my travel besties.