Yesterday, Uber told employees that it is cutting roughly 3,300 people, or 10 percent of its workforce, and then posted Dara Khosrowshahi's internal memo to its public newsroom immediately thereafter. Since 2022, publishing the CEO's layoff note has become routine in tech, but it's still rarer than it should be. The memo raised the awkward question on the company's behalf, "I'm sure you're asking, 'Why, and why now?' - particularly since our business is performing so well."

Since you brought it up, Dara, yes.

According to the email, even with revenue tripling over the last five+ years, Khosrowshahi says the company heard directly from its own people through internal surveys and conversations that the existing structure wasn't working. There was too much time spent coordinating across teams, decisions took too long, and nobody was really sure who owned what. He says, "I'm sure many of you have felt that you spend too much time 'aligning' rather than building." So when he outlines the solutions, they come off as answers to complaints employees themselves raised, not a pure numbers/spreadsheet exercise. Fewer layers between the CEO and the front line, fewer one- and two-person teams, remote work down to about 1 percent of staff, three delivery-operations teams folded into one. The framing doesn't ask employees to blindly trust a vague strategy, it reflects back a problem employees already told the company about.

Then the media coverage came in, and I think the results were better than most layoff coverage. Bloomberg, CNBC and Reuters all ran Uber's own narrative frame (fewer management layers = a simpler company) which is the benefit of going first and publishing the internal announcement externally. Most tier one media used Uber's words because Uber's words were the best source available.

The memo did leave one door open though because alongside the "we got too complicated" message, Khosrowshahi gave a second reason for the cuts: they'd free up money to invest in the future, including in self-driving cars. What he didn't say is how much money, or how much of the savings will go to self-driving and so, naturally, that gap got filled fast. Uber has spent months telling investors it plans to put more than $10 billion into autonomous vehicles, so some outlets simply connected the dots: layoff savings = $10 billion and ran headlines about Uber cutting jobs to pay for robotaxis. The official messaging of course never said that.

Every reorg comms plan should include a decision around leak strategy: are you telling this story or reacting to it? That call depends heavily on your business and the size of the cut; 10 percent at a company like Uber is going to leak quickly no matter what, but a three percent trim at a private organization might never be news at all. If it's going to get out, being first and on offense sets the starting position for everything that follows. Second, have your corrections ready before the story runs, because people will draw connections -- some that don't exist and some that do exist but that you aren't ready to confirm. The robotaxi link was probably the second kind. Know in advance which you'll knock down and which you'll simply decline to give oxygen to. Third, judge the result by the audience that matters. For a CEO cutting 3,300 jobs from a business that's doing well, the memo was well framed: it named the problem employees had already flagged, it put numbers on it, and the market shrugged in the right direction with shares up as much as 2 percent on the day, with Bloomberg Intelligence estimating $1.5 to $2 billion in annual savings.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) posted 26 food recall notices in August, compared to 18 and 19 in the previous two Augusts respectively according to The New Republic's count, and 12 of them were salmonella. Whether that's a worse food supply or a busier regulator isn't entirely clear but shoppers aren't waiting to find out. A survey released Tuesday by GS1 US, the nonprofit behind the UPC barcode on every package, found 67 percent of Americans have avoided an entire food category after a recall, up from 60 percent last year; 66 percent hesitate to buy the same brand again; and 59 percent have thrown out recalled food even when their state wasn't affected. I thought GS1 US's Melanie Nuce-Hilton put the issue perfectly to Fortune: "Consumers are making a category-level decision about a product-level problem."

Fortunately (and unfortunately), I've managed communications through many recalls and here's why this is a comms problem in addition to a food safety problem. When a company recalls a product, it writes the notice and lists only its own brands. The egg recall that dominated the entire month of August was from one supplier, Midwest Poultry Services and they named Kroger, Simple Truth, Brookshire's, Country Morning and Sunups brands. But a shopper standing at the egg case isn't studying that recall notice. They read the news headline of 98 people sick across 17 states, and the headline said it was from "eggs."

This has happened before. In 2009, a supplier of peanut paste to food makers caused a salmonella outbreak. Jif, Skippy and Peter Pan weren't involved, their jars were fine, but sales of peanut butter still fell 22 percent in four weeks. Smuckers and the maker of Peter Pan both took out half-page newspaper ads in outlets across the US explaining their products were safe and offering coupons. Jif alone took about 40,000 calls from worried customers.

The good news is the survey also found that shoppers come back, and it tells us what brings them back. Asked what would make them buy again, more than a third pointed to how much time had passed, how serious the contamination was, and what health authorities were saying. Only nine percent of respondents said they'd never buy the recalled brand again so, in other words, people aren't done with the category forever. They're just waiting for someone to tell them what's safe. That's the opening for the brands that weren't recalled, and there's a good example.

Reckitt, the company that makes Enfamil, during the 2022 baby formula recall at its rival Abbott. Reckitt put out a statement saying none of its formula was affected -- and it didn't stop there. It listed the specific bacteria its formula had been tested for, so the "we're safe" claim had proof behind it, and it also announced it was shipping 30 percent more formula and opening a hotline for parents who couldn't find any on shelves. So worried parents got 1) a claim, 2) the evidence for said claim and 3) something they could do.

Ultimately, there's no such thing as a bystander in a recall. There are companies the notice names and companies the shopper blames, and the survey says the second group is, well, everyone in the category. You can't perfectly script your response in advance, because so much of this depends on how much of the category is affected, in which states, whether anyone got sick, and whether the recalled company buys from the same supplier you do. But this is a good reminder that you don't get to decide whether you're in the story, you only get to decide whether you show up in it with proof, with something useful, and with competitors beside you... or whether you wait for your name to clear while the aisle empties anyway.