So you've been made redundant
This is a more emotional piece than my typical newsletter. The reason for that is that I’ve just received the news that my position has been eliminated earlier this week as I was getting back from a wonderful Labor Day weekend.
This news elicited a very strange mix of emotions: anger (at my employer and at myself), disappointment, anxiety, and strange excitement.
Anger (at my employer)—I think that when receiving this news, you quickly start thinking ‘why me’. The answer is often unsatisfactory because the decision, as you might have been told, has nothing to do with your performance. Your position has been eliminated begs the question…by who? why? I assume my position didn’t wake up on Wednesday and decided of its own accord that it had enough. A decision was reached. Business conditions were assessed. Somewhere underneath all those agentless verbs are human being who, in my case, gave the place the better part of a decade. I almost which that I’d been fired for bad performance so that I knew exactly what went wrong and how to do better. Instead, I just have to live with the fact that a decision was made by a faction of nameless, faceless leaders to put me out of job. This is a deeply disturbing reminder that you are not in control.
Anger (at myself)—Even though my manager reassures me that there’s nothing different I could have done, deep down I know that’s not true. Her role wasn’t eliminated. Nor was the VP of the function. I had been angling for a promotion for a while, figuring out ways to take the next steps into a leadership position. But I took too long. I wasn’t proactive enough. I was too comfortable with my existing role and salary. I should always considered this possibility as an alternative instead of resting on my laurels.
Disappointment—After the better part of a decade in the organization, I had plans and ideas for myself, and the organization. A document on my OneDrive is entitled: The Future of Digital Marketing at Siemens. A OneNote page lists different positions that I aspire to reach after 1, 3, 5 and 10 years. Now I know that these ideas will never be implemented; these goals will never be reached.
Anxiety —I now find myself in a precarious and unfamiliar situation of not having a salary to depend on. My wife and I just purchased a house a few months ago. Of course, we did not consider the fact that we may have to make the monthly payments without 75% of our joint monthly earnings. I’m a relatively positive person and, long-term, I’m not worried. What I’m worried about is the immediate need to find a job to help pay the bills.
Excitement—What I did not expect to feel during the call with HR is excitement. Yet I certainly felt it. All at once, the possibilities that I had only been dreaming about became possible. Opening my own agency. Doing consulting. Reading and writing more. Taking time to find the next steps in my journey. I could talk about these ideas before, but the reality of being employed is that these ideas always took a backseat the today’s reality. Let’s hold that feeling. We’ll come back to it.
Why this happened, and what to do about it
First, let’s talk about how the cuts actually get made There is a sort of comfort in the story that someone weighed your contribution, your potential, your reviews, and reluctantly concluded the business could live without you. This story provides you with agency. If you have proven yourself over the years, you won’t be on the chopping block. That story is almost never true. It flatters everyone. Leaders for agonizing, you for mattering enough to agonize over.
The real version is much more mundane. A number comes down from a great height: reduce cost by X, says the edict. It arrives as a spreadsheet. And a spreadsheet doesn't see humans. It doesn’t even see performance or expertise. It sees salary bands. It sees who is expensive relative to how legibly their work maps to this quarter's revenue. This is where senior individual contributors get into trouble. They are doing real, hard-to-replace work in the awkward middle, but are too costly to be cheap, too far from the C-suite to be protected. The work wasn’t bad, though clearly not good enough to get you promoted to the rank of ‘untouchable’. But the work was expensive and hard to defend in CFO speak.
Is it AI’s fault?
My LinkedIn is full of charlatans claiming that they replaced their entire marketing team with Claude, or some version of that.
These charlatans get tons of engagement for 2 reasons. First, they tap into our inherent fear of unknown technology. When the Sam Altman’s of the world claim that AI is the single most significant technology ever invented, and that it will reshape everything about our society, it’s difficult not to get caught up in fear mongering. Second, the charlatans are hinting at a truth: AI will reshape how we work; in fact, it already is. But AI is not why my position (and many like mine) are getting eliminated.
Mark Ritson made the sharp observation recently, writing about a brilliant, restructured-out CMO who suddenly couldn't get her phone to ring: AI has handed every CEO a license to redraw the org chart. License. Not reason. Not cause. Permission.
The cut was always about cost. It was about cost in 2019 and it'll be about cost in 2030. What's changed is that AI gave leadership a respectable sentence to say out loud in the boardroom. "We're restructuring for efficiency" used to sound like what it was: we're spending less. "We're reorganising around AI" sounds like strategy. Same decision. Better press release.
This matters enormously to you, because if you believe the cover story you'll prepare for the wrong future. You'll go and panic-learn prompt engineering to prove you're not obsolete, when the thing that made you vulnerable was never a capability gap. It was your position on a cost sheet. Prepare for the cause, not the alibi.
Why "just network and wait" is a rich man's plan
Ritson's diagnosis of the market is bleak and, annoyingly, correct. Senior marketing jobs are genuinely vanishing. US marketing employment sits well below pre-pandemic levels, the CMO title is quietly disappearing off executive teams, and applicants per open role have roughly doubled since 2022. Worse, the people already in the good seats have stopped moving. Why jump when the room is on fire? Ritson calls it the Great Stay, and it means the music has stopped with most of the chairs still occupied. A queue of accomplished, expensive, blameless people now forms behind every rare opening.
So far, so grim, so true.
What to do? Network relentlessly. Be patient. The good ones are fine eventually.
That's a plan that works beautifully if you're the kind of person that has an executive assistant fielding calls for you, flying to conferences on the company dime. For that person, waiting is a strategy.
For the rest of us, the ones in the awkward middle with a finite runway, a family, and a severance measured in a handful of weeks, "wait, you'll be fine eventually" is not advice.
Any advice?
To be clear, I’m writing this just one day after hearing the news. So my advice is not based on anything more than my personal reflection over the past 24 hours.
My first instinct: get back in. The necessity of getting a salary to pay the bills takes precedent over the luxury of things like finding work that I enjoy. Indeed, the first few hours after the announcement, I found myself polishing up my CV and sending applications to random LinkedIn EasyApply jobs without even looking at the description.
But then taking a step back, talking to my family and friends, a question started to arise. Why rush back inside a building exactly like the one that just removed me? A building where my entire security rests on remaining legible and affordable to someone who thinks of my life's work as a row on a spreadsheet.
As middle manager in marketing, we are competing, ferociously, for a diminishing number of seats, against a queue of people as good as you, for the privilege of being a line item again.
If you’ve been reading subscribed for a while, you know that I like to find the somewhat contrarian take. So, I asked myself, what’s the contrarian thing to do here? Well, the genuinely contrarian response to being made redundant is to build something — a capability, a reputation, an income, a thing with your name on it — that doesn't depend on anyone else.
The market is frozen, yes. But it's only frozen for people still trying to get back into the building. Outside, where the leverage isn't a job title, it's not frozen at all. It's wide open, albeit absolutely terrifying.
So maybe they didn't eliminate your position. They handed you the excuse you'd been waiting for. Now go use it.
If you've just had the letter and want to compare notes, my inbox is open.