Exec Comms in the Era of ‘Because I Said So’

The through line from Marc Andreessen’s introspection-is-for-losers hot take to Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday greeting — “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards” — would be shocking if it wasn’t so predictable.

In between are the strongarm communications tactics of executives who have decided, in this particular moment, that trust is optional.

Andreessen, co-founder of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in the world, told a podcast host he operates with “as little as possible” self-reflection. “Move forward. Go.”

Great men of history, he said, never sat around doing this stuff. He framed the refusal to examine his own impact not as a flaw to manage but as a marker of greatness.

So we look to Marc Benioff at Salesforce’s annual company kickoff, asking his international employees to stand for recognition, then joking that ICE agents were in the back of the room monitoring them.

There were boos. Slack messages. An open letter from more than 1,400 employees. All of it was edited out for the replay.

On to Oracle, where 30,000 employees opened their laptops to a termination email sent at 6 a.m. “Today is your last working day.”

No conversation with a manager. No call from HR. Just a locked screen where an intranet used to be and an offensive invitation: “Please click here to submit a personal email address immediately.”

And finally, to Mark Zuckerberg, who is developing a photorealistic AI clone so that all 70,000 Meta employees might feel more connected to him — at the same moment the company is reportedly planning to cut up to 20% of its workforce.

One wonders if those layoffs will be outsourced to an avatar.

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If you think all of this will have no bearing on how employees interpret everything you communicate — values, performance, results — you’re not paying attention.

Because none of this is happening in a vacuum.

This is the context your employees are bringing with them when they open your all-hands invitation, read your restructuring announcement, or receive your CEO’s message about “navigating uncertainty together” in your AI transformation.

They are not compartmentalizing. Their nervous systems are not filing the Oracle email under “not my company” and the Benioff ICE joke under “not my CEO.”

They are pattern-matching, and the pattern is clear: power does not have to explain itself anymore.

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Which matters more than you think it does.

We are in a “because I said so” era. And though it didn’t start with Trump, he’s certainly championing it.

A polycrisis that began with the pandemic stripping away predictability has continued through climate disasters, rolling layoffs, return-to-office mandates, and AI ultimatums.

In my research with 24 internal communications practitioners, every single respondent reported navigating three or more overlapping crises in the past 18 months. More than half navigated five or more simultaneously.

And now we are in a moment where the most powerful people in business and government are openly modeling a style of leadership defined by the absence of accountability, empathy, or reflection.

Andreessen didn’t stop at saying he doesn’t introspect. He said introspection is for people who get stuck. He framed the refusal to examine one’s own impact as a feature of greatness.

In a “because I said so” world, these are not isolated, quirky ramblings from a venture capitalist. They’re the same beliefs delivering threats of genocide with a side of Cadbury eggs.

It’s not enough to hope employees don’t assume their leader thinks the same way.

We need to make it clear they don’t.

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Aristotle gave us three modes of persuasion: logos, ethos, pathos. Logic, credibility, and emotional connection.

Executive communications used to at least attempt all three. What we’re watching now is the deliberate abandonment of rhetoric.

“Because I said so” is coercion. And coercion has a neurological cost.

Neuroscientist Paul Zak’s research on oxytocin — the brain chemical that signals when it’s safe to trust — shows that high stress is a potent inhibitor of the very chemistry that makes people willing to cooperate, take risks, and engage.

Compared to employees at low-trust organizations, those at high-trust companies report 74% less stress, 40% less burnout, and 13% fewer sick days.

Trust is everything — and your communications either support or degrade it, message by message.

My own research tells a similar story from inside organizations. 

Nearly 80% of practitioners cited maintaining employee trust during uncertainty as a primary driver of their own stress and burnout. 

These are senior practitioners — directors, VPs, people with 15-plus years of experience — and they are burning out trying to craft people-centered communications inside organizations that are increasingly rewarding the opposite of humanity at the top.

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So what do you do if you’re an exec comms pro who still believes that how you communicate is how you lead?

You double-down on trust. According to Zak, high-trust companies don’t just have happier employees — they have employees who are 50% more productive and 76% more engaged.

And you build communications that do the opposite of what the current moment is modeling:

• Safety over chaos — predictable cadences, consistent voices, no 6 a.m. emails.
• Honesty over spin — including about what leadership doesn’t know yet.
• Agency over mandate — giving people choices in how they receive and act on information, rather than issuing ultimatums and waiting for compliance.
• Dialogue over cascade — creating actual feedback loops instead of performing them.

This is the Steady framework that anchors Internal Calms™, a system I’ve created to help communicators keep employees grounded through ongoing polycrisis and uncertainty.

Its premise is simple: traditional communications are designed for audiences with full cognitive and emotional capacity. In a polycrisis, no one has that. 

The goal isn’t to make employees feel good. It’s to create the conditions for steadiness at a moment when almost nothing else is.

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Aristotle understood that rhetoric is relational. What the speaker communicates about their own character influences what an audience is willing to believe, now and in the future.

Ethos is a continuous act.

The executives who are modeling zero introspection, ICE jokes, and 6 a.m. termination emails are making a statement about their character every time they communicate.

So are the ones who aren’t offering an alternative. Silence is a form of communication.

Your employees are watching. They’re watching what gets said, what gets left out, what gets laughed at, and who is treated as though they matter.

They’re watching it at the geopolitical level and at the organizational level and they are, consciously or not, connecting the dots.

The question for exec comms pros right now isn’t whether the external environment affects your internal communications. It does.

The question is whether you’re going to pretend it doesn’t.