On July 17, 2014, the Microsoft executive Stephen Elop sent a memo to his staff. It began “Hello there.” In the eleventh paragraph it said that the plan “would result in an estimated reduction of 12,500 factory direct and professional employees.”
Kevin Roose of New York magazine wrote that the memo “takes 11 paragraphs to get to the point.” In the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway called it “a case study in how not to write, how not to think, and how not to lead a business.”