Welcome back. You are inheriting something better than the org chart suggests and worse than the earnings calls admit.
Here is the uncomfortable math. The last consumer innovation this company shipped that genuinely surprised the market was the voice remote. That was a decade ago. Since then we have iterated, rebranded, and repackaged. We have not invented. A technology company that goes ten years without a breakthrough does not have a talent problem. It has a culture problem.
The talent is here. I see it every day, two and three levels below the leaders whose names you know. You spent a decade in private equity looking for underdeployed assets. You are inheriting one, and it does not show up on any balance sheet. It is the layer of people whose ideas exist but never compound, because they die in the space between teams, ground down by territorial disputes that no one above has the will to resolve. Alignment gets talked about in every ops review and practiced in almost none of them.
Worse than misalignment, we actively compete against each other. Teams undermine teams. Credit gets fought over harder than problems do. In that environment, bringing a good idea forward is a risk, because someone will see it as a threat to their territory before anyone sees it as value for the customer. And when we do need fresh thinking, our reflex is to hire a consulting firm rather than look at the people already in the building who have been raising their hands for years. We pay outsiders to tell us things our own employees have been saying for free.
The deeper issue is tenure without growth, and it is not confined to any one business unit. Across the company, senior leadership has been in place for a very long time. Longevity became the qualification. Loyalty became the currency. The same leaders who mandate culture and leadership training for everyone below them have not meaningfully changed how they operate in years. They are skilled at protecting their positions and the structures that support them. They are not producing new ideas, and the people under them who do produce new ideas rarely get an audience.
This is also why there is no growth pipeline. When leaders stay in the same seats for a decade, everyone below them stays put too. Ambitious people learn there is nowhere to grow into, so they either leave or shrink to fit. And something quieter happens over time. When good ideas get stomped out often enough, people stop bringing them. A culture that does not respect ideas eventually stops producing them. That is not a morale problem. That is the mechanism behind the innovation drought itself, and it compounds every year the same names hold the same roles.
The separation gives you something no sitting CEO here has had in fifteen years: a legitimate reason to rebuild rather than inherit. When the new Comcast stands up its leadership, the easy move is to promote the familiar names into familiar boxes. If that happens, the culture transfers intact and the innovation drought comes with it. The harder move is to actually open those roles, look hard at the layers below, and ask who has shipped something new in the last five years rather than who has survived the longest.
Two smaller things that would cost you little and signal a lot. First, loosen the rigidity around return to office. The current posture reads as distrust, and distrust is expensive in exactly the currency you need most right now, which is discretionary effort. Second, go find the people doing innovative work without permission. Every large company has them. Ours have learned to keep it quiet. Make it safe to be visible and you will be surprised what surfaces.
Here is a data point you will not find in any diligence deck. When the separation was announced, the mood on the media side was not sadness. It was relief. The sentiment that circulated among NBCU and Sky colleagues was that they were finally free of the anchor that had been holding them down, and the anchor they meant was not our balance sheet. It was our culture. Treat that as what it is: an exit interview from the two businesses that knew us best. The companies we owned identified our way of operating as the liability they most wanted to shed. No leader here has acknowledged it. That silence tells you as much as the sentiment does.
One more thing, and it is the big one. After the separation, this company cannot afford to be seen as the old broadband business managing its decline at a slower rate. Right now Wall Street is grading us on losing fewer subscribers than expected. Think about that. Our wins are measured in smaller losses. Analysts are openly saying that eventually we will have to prove we can grow. The spin gives the market a reason to look at us fresh, and it will be watching for one thing: evidence that this is a technology company with a next act, not a utility with good marketing. If the new Comcast launches and the story is the same network, the same products, and the same leadership, the market will price us accordingly and it will be right to. We need to give them something big. Not a rebrand. An actual innovation. The kind of thing this company has not shipped in a decade, built by people who are already here waiting for someone to ask.
You said the company’s assets and track record provide a powerful foundation for the future. The assets are real. The track record on innovation is not, and most of us inside know it. The question is whether the new Comcast gets a new culture or the old one with a new ticker symbol.
We are watching to see which one you choose.
- A Comcast employee who wants to stay