After reading Andrew Mason's clever, quirky and surprisingly frank announcement regarding his firing, I felt somewhat refreshed. As a corporate big shot in the all-too-often stuffy and gray business sphere, Mason found just the right balance of honesty, sincerity, and quirkiness in his take on an internal memo. Groupon is a forward-thinking, modern company with a lot of creativity at its core. Thus, communicating his own departure with a healthy dose of that creativity and acknowledging his own faults seems like a perfectly fitting way to go out. If the reason for Mason's departure had been some major internal scandal or legal issue, this would be a different story.
However, in the modern business world, it is no secret that everything revolves around the bottom line. This appears to be a simple case of a once-sucessful co-founder/CEO who made some wrong turns as a businessman and suffered the consequences in the form of his company's financial failure and demotion on the corporate spectrum. Rather than beat around the bush or pretend that he "resigned," Mason got straight to the point, which gave him a stronger platform to explain himself. Most employees would rather hear the truth than a bunch of succession jargon anyway, so by starting off with a blunt delivery of the news, perhaps Mason gained their trust, respect or at least time to hear him out. Throwing in expressions of his gratitude, his hope for the company and some advice -- while keeping his message relatively concise -- gives a more human side to the suit and makes employees realize he really does (and did) care. For this company and this situation, I definitely think Mason made a smart, albeit bold, move.
Tweeting the message was definitely a nontraditional channel of internal communication, but I liked that Mason figured "it would be leaked anyway" and decided to open it to public eyes. Rather than seeming insincere, Mason exhibited a sense of transparency and honesty by communicating with the masses through Twitter. I think social media information sharing in the form of crisis communications will continue to grow as time goes on, but I believe many companies with more traditional or conservative business models will stick to strictly internal communication when it comes to succession issues, at least initially at the time of the announcement.
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