☎️ The real audience for AT&T's 'employee memo' wasn't employees... (Insider Comms™)

A Sunday night memo about Thursday's outage? The timing says everything about who the CEO was really talking to.

AI prompt: a man doing a high-wire act above the city of Dallas. Art Deco style. Landscape oriented. Dark and moody. Charcoal medium.

A massive network outage disconnected millions of AT&T customers.

CEO John Stankey's job? Reconnect with upset employees, anxious consumers, and watchful investors.

📝 All through one memo.

• Remind me: AT&T experienced a massive network outage on Feb 22, 2024, affecting about a quarter of their customers. The company blamed an “incorrect process” during network expansion efforts, though that clinical description hardly captures the chaos of a morning when millions couldn't make calls, send texts, or access TikTok (the horror!).

• Three days later(!)—on Sunday, Feb 25—Stankey sent the memo to employees.

What's revealing about Stankey's memo is its high-wire act:

• acknowledging failure while projecting confidence

• apologizing while minimizing

• managing employee fears while calming market jitters

Does he succeed? That depends on which audience you're asking—and which paragraph you're reading.

• Despite a few shortcomings, Stankey’s memo is very good—one of the best in the Insider Comms™ archive.

• 📌 You’ll want to bookmark this for future reference when you experience your own outage or customer service crisis.

Here's what you'll learn in this edition of Insider Comms:

• ✔️ The subtle art of Stankey's “yes, but” strategy (so clever!)

• ✔️ Why this memo is actually written for Wall Street (despite being sent to employees; a classic mixternal move)

• ✔️ Three tightrope-walking techniques for crisis comms pros

And, as usual, I share the complete memo.

🎪 On with the show!