Week 9: The reorg

What a restructure resets, the order a list is built in, dependency as the last filter, and the ceiling that strategy puts on the person using it.

4 May 2027

Why it worksA reorg resets every relationship a rating depended on; what survives is being the one person whose removal breaks something visible.

Every trick in weeks 3 to 8 depends on a specific person remembering a specific thing about you: a skip-level who knows your name, a manager whose memory you have been feeding, an executive who read your launch email. A restructure replaces those people. The new manager has no memory of your quarter, the new chair has never heard your name, and the brag document describes a team that has been merged into another one.

What survives a reorg is not reputation; it is dependency. Practitioner accounts of how layoff and restructure lists get built agree on the order: function, cost, level band, then the question of who cannot be removed without something breaking. That last filter is the only one an individual can reach, and reaching it means being the single point of failure for a system the organisation needs. It is the most effective trick in the course and the one with the highest cost to everyone else.

It has a second cost, which the practitioner accounts leave out because they are written by people who survived. The person nobody can remove is the person nobody can promote. A promotion is a move off the system you alone understand, and the organisation that kept you for that reason will not fund the move. A bus factor of one is a survival strategy with a ceiling, and the ceiling is exactly where you are standing.

Outline#

• what a reorg resets: manager, chair, memory, the team in your brag doc
• the order in which a list is built, and where individuals enter it
• dependency as the last filter, and the bus factor as a career strategy
• the cost of that strategy to the team, and the ceiling it puts on you
• what week 12 does about both

Sources

• Sucher and Gupta, Layoffs that don't break your company (Harvard Business Review, 2018)
• How companies decide who to lay off and who to keep (Dice)