Your CEO's resignation letter was three pages long. Steve Jobs needed 153 words.
Updated: Aug 17
What internal comms gets wrong about high-stakes leadership announcements
When a senior leader announces their departure, communications teams have to move fast. Legal signs off on every line. HR controls the sequence of who hears what and when. The departing executive wants their legacy framed on their own terms. And leadership wants one clean announcement that puts the whole thing to rest.
The result is a letter that becomes a vehicle for everyone's needs. And the one set of needs that gets ignored in that process is the reader's.
In March 2024, Dave Calhoun sat down to write one of the most consequential internal communications of his tenure at Boeing. The company was two months into the fallout from the Alaska Airlines door-plug incident. Regulators were circling. The press was watching. And Calhoun had decided, after consultation with the board, that this would be his last year as CEO.
His letter hit every note a departure communication is supposed to hit: resignation reason, succession process, stability messaging, and gratitude. But it arrived in an employee's inbox carrying six different jobs at once:
The CEO is leaving — but not until the end of the year. So the company has a CEO, just temporarily. The board chair is also leaving — but not until the shareholder meeting. So the company has a board chair, just temporarily. A new board chair has been named — Steve Mollenkopf, who will lead the search for a new CEO. So the person responsible for replacing the CEO is himself brand new to the role. The head of commercial airplanes is retiring, effective immediately — and his replacement, Stephanie Pope, starts today.
The resignation letter that tried to do everything
A few things jump out when you see it laid out like this:
The safety statement opens and closes the letter. Your opening sentences aren't just a framing device. It's the structural wrapper. Everything else is sandwiched between two safety commitments, so the reader starts anxious and ends up back where they started.
The news gets delayed. Calhoun's letter opens with a safety statement, a gratitude note, and a legacy reflection before it reaches the actual news. By the time the reader learns he's leaving, they've already absorbed two other messages that weren't the point — and their anxiety has had time to build. Someone who doesn't make it to paragraph three leaves with assumptions instead of answers.
The actual news is the thinnest part. Two paragraphs cover the CEO's departure, and both spend more time on his feelings about the role than on what happens next. The board chair tribute gets more real estate.
Paragraphs 6 and 7 are where it really breaks. A full paragraph on Kellner's legacy, followed by a full paragraph introducing Mollenkopf — in a letter that should only be about Calhoun leaving. Neither of them is the subject of this communication. They've each been handed a paragraph in someone else's
departure letter.
Gratitude gets scattered. Calhoun thanks employees in paragraph two, thanks Larry Kellner across two full paragraphs in the middle, thanks Stan Deal, and praises Stephanie Pope. Appreciation threaded through every section stops reading as genuine sentiment and starts reading as filler — something dropped between announcements to soften the transitions. That breeds mistrust, not warmth.
Succession becomes a puzzle. The letter names four people — Kellner, Mollenkopf, Deal, Pope — across four role changes, two effective dates, and an unnamed CEO successor at the end of a search that hasn't started. A reader trying to answer "who's in charge?" has to assemble that answer themselves, when the letter should have handed it to them.
The most actionable information arrives last. Pope's appointment is the only change with immediate operational meaning for employees. It shows up in paragraph 8, introduced with "in addition to these changes" — as an afterthought, rather than the clearest answer to "who's in charge right now."
No single document can carry all of that information clearly. Try to make it work, and what you get isn't communication — it's a checklist. Clear enough for the legal, and hr, exhausting for the person trying to figure out what it means for them.
What this looks like next to a letter that worked
In August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple in 153 words. He stated his resignation in sentence two. He named his successor in the same paragraph. He expressed gratitude in three sentences at the close. He signed it with his first name.
Jobs didn't skip any of the checklist items — resignation reason, succession plan, and gratitude are all there. But the letter had one job: tell the people who needed to know what was happening and what came next. No safety statement. No tribute to a departing board member woven in. No parallel announcement about another division. If those things needed saying, they'd get their own communication.
The difference was that the letter was structured around one clear message for the audience — not around everything the organisation wanted to say.
What this means for comms professionals
The lesson isn't to "be brief." Three pages versus 153 words is a symptom, not the cause.
It's about Framing your key message as a filter. It's the decision you make before you draft that determines whether your letter does one job cleanly or six jobs badly.
Before you write a single line, the most useful thing you can do is finish this sentence: when the reader puts this down, the one thing I need them to know is __________, so that they feel [specific outcome]. Not the three things. Not the six. The one. Everything should either serve that answer or belong in a different communication entirely.
What the Boeing letter should have been
Calhoun's one message: "I've decided this will be my last year as CEO." Everything else should have supported it.
State the news first. Not the crisis context, not the gratitude — the news.
Name who's in charge now. Stephanie Pope's appointment was the one immediate, concrete change employees could act on. It should have led, not trailed.
Acknowledge the succession gap directly. There was no named successor because the search hadn't begun. Saying so plainly — the board has appointed Steve Mollenkopf as incoming chair, and he'll lead the process of selecting my successor; we'll update you by [date] — is more reassuring than burying it in a paragraph about the outgoing chair's tenure.
Say thank you once, in one paragraph, at the end — not threaded through every announcement as a transition device.
Before the next one goes out
The Boeing letter is a useful case study showing what happens when the communication process works exactly as it normally does — stakeholders, lawyers, and HR adding what they want to say but ignoring the reader.
Start with different questions, before you draft: "What is this specific document's one job?" Not what every stakeholder needs to say. Not what the template covers. What does this letter need to accomplish for the person reading it? If the answer takes six bullet points, you don't have a letter — you have a press release.
A few checks before you send:
Count the obligations. If the draft announces more than one leadership change, ask whether each belongs in this document — or whether the reader is better served by separate, sequenced sends.
Find the succession answer. and put it in the first third of the letter. If you don't have it yet, say so directly.
Map where gratitude appears. More than once means consolidate — scattered appreciation reads as filler, not feeling.
Ask whether the person reading this, with no other context, trusts it, understands it, and knows what happens next?
What stays if you remove what each stakeholder added? What legal required, what HR approved, what the departing executive wanted said about their legacy. What's left is the letter. If there's almost nothing left, it was never really written for the employee.
The Boeing letter was the product of a communication process that often asks a single document to carry more than one key message. To consolidate everything into one send. It happens at every company, on almost every high-stakes announcement. But consolidation without a clear centre doesn't simplify communication; it compresses the confusion and mails it to 170,000 people at once.
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