As a member of the Board of Directors, I am pleased to announce that the takeover of EI is now complete! This old company, so full of potential but for so long shackled by poor management, will soon breathe deep of fresh inspirations, some of which we have already begun to implement.
Granted, we face challenges. Within our vast employee base, a personality cult remains; old friends of the previous CEO and loyal to his principles. And, yes, we continue to discover machinery and processes that he allegedly designed, whose purpose we do yet not fully understand, but we are confident that we will meet these challenges and emerge from the current decline in production stronger than ever.
As investors, you will want to know that we are dealing forcefully with issues that emerged during the transition in leadership, and I will provide a few examples.
A fundamental problem with the old CEO was his inflexible adherence to certain procedures which we experienced as burdensome and unnecessary. Naturally, we have removed or modified many such procedures in our Employee Manual. Our doubters unfairly claim that these changes contribute to various failures within the system, to high rates of absenteeism among leaders at various levels of management and the unfortunate atmosphere of conflict (which we acknowledge) among younger employees. In truth, such conflict, though difficult, is a necessary and healthy step toward forging a new corporate culture.
Another highly exasperating fallacy of the old regime is the remarkable idea that the old CEO had actually designed the company. Our engineers have been hard at work for some time now studying the processes by which our product is produced and have come to the unanimous conclusion that our company’s structures and machinery and processes are far too large and complex to have been designed. Let us finally be done with fairy tales: our Company and its technology just happened, and the old management was merely claiming credit for the way things are.
Despite our reasoned and earnest explanations, we have been sorry to find that some employees resist the gift of our conclusions, and this brings us to another fundamental change in the way we will do business. While the old CEO, for reasons best known to himself, tolerated all manner of dissent and insisted upon offering employees freedom to accept or refuse his policies, we will choose the more efficient path of requiring correct behavior and – even more important – correct opinions.
I hope this brief report will increase your confidence in our new leadership and discredit earlier claims that Earth, Inc. is spinning out of control.