Picture a Monday town hall. A CFO stands in front of two hundred employees and says, evenly, “We’re reallocating headcount toward higher-value functions.” Half the room nods — the half whose jobs are safe. The other half hears something different: you are not high-value. Nobody on the leadership team intended cruelty. The sentence was written for a boardroom, and it never occurred to anyone that a hundred people who don’t sit in that boardroom would hear it read aloud.
That scenario is invented. You don’t have to invent the real one.
On May 19, 2026, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters told investors at a Hong Kong forum that the bank was “replacing, in some cases, lower value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in” (Bloomberg News, 2026b). The bank confirmed it expects to eliminate more than 7,800 corporate-function roles by 2030 — over 15% of its support workforce (Bloomberg News, 2026b). Regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore sought clarification, and much of the backlash centered on the phrase itself and what it seemed to say about the people affected (Bloomberg News, 2026b; Zillman, 2026). Winters’s first response compounded it: a LinkedIn post offering context and reproducing his own transcript. When that drew further criticism, he issued a more direct apology hours later — a sequence some read as defensive, explaining the words before owning their impact (Bloomberg News, 2026a; Kruse, 2026).
The bias hiding inside the blunder
Winters’s fluency in investor and capital-allocation language may have contributed to the mistake. Economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber coined the term curse of knowledge in 1989 to describe a related failure: once people know something, they systematically struggle to reconstruct how the situation appears to someone who does not possess that knowledge (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989). Their experiments showed that better-informed people couldn’t stop their own private information from leaking into their predictions of what less-informed people would think — even when it cost them money to get it wrong.
The clearest demonstration is Elizabeth Newton’s “tappers and listeners” study, conducted as Stanford doctoral research. Tappers drummed the rhythm of a familiar song on a table; listeners had to guess the tune from rhythm alone. Tappers expected listeners to succeed about half the time. Listeners identified only three of 120 songs correctly — 2.5% (Newton, 1990; as popularized in Heath & Heath, 2007). Tappers couldn’t help hearing the melody in their heads. Winters, similarly, may not have been able to hear how “resourcing logic” sounded outside the boardroom.
Harvard Business School’s Sandra Sucher described the audience conflict clearly: “What happens with some of these CEO announcements is that they are addressing one audience but harming their relations with another” (quoted in Zillman, 2026). Carnegie Mellon’s Denise Rousseau added the diagnosis: Winters was “talking with a kind of C-suite language… he’s talking to the marketplace; he’s not talking to his workers” (quoted in Zillman, 2026). Bandura’s research on moral disengagement offers another lens: sanitized language can make harmful conduct feel more benign to the person describing it (Bandura, 1999). That doesn’t establish Winters’s motive, but it helps explain why corporate abstractions feel neutral inside an organization and dehumanizing outside it.
The same words, filtered through two different frames, produce two different realities — illustrated below.
A documented contrast
Compare this to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s message announcing the layoff of 1,900 employees — about 25% of the company — on May 5, 2020 (Airbnb Newsroom, 2020). Chesky was specific about the business reality, severance, and healthcare support, and direct about the human cost: “I have a deep feeling of love for all of you” (Airbnb Newsroom, 2020). The message has since been praised by leadership and business commentators as an unusually empathetic example of layoff communication (Kelly, 2020). Same category of hard news. Opposite translation. Chesky later reconsidered Airbnb’s practice of describing the company as a family, observing that “you don’t fire members of your family” (Fortune, 2024) — a reminder that translating for your audience is an ongoing discipline, not a one-time fix.
Where this shows up in your revenue engine
The curse of knowledge isn’t only a layoff-communication risk. It’s a daily tax on growth. Founders write pricing pages in the internal logic of their roadmap. Reps inherit leadership’s category jargon and repeat it to buyers who’ve never heard it. This same dynamic can damage positioning: the people closest to a product may assume knowledge that prospective buyers do not have.
A few disciplines worth building into how your organization communicates, internally and externally:
Name every audience before you write a word. A single message — an all-hands email, a renewal notice, a homepage headline — reaches employees, customers, investors, and prospects at once. Draft with all of them in view, not just the one you pictured first.
Run the screenshot test. Before anything ships, ask whether one sentence, pulled out of context, would still hold up without you in the room to explain it. Cheapest audit available — and it would have caught Winters’ phrase.
Translate the metric into the impact. “More than 15% of support roles eliminated” is a resourcing statement. “Here’s who this affects and what we’re doing for them” is a human one. Lead with the second.
Use an outside reader, literally. Have someone unfamiliar with your internal shorthand read the message before it ships — one of the practical safeguards Pinker recommends for counteracting the curse of knowledge (Pinker, 2014).
If you correct yourself, translate forward, don’t relitigate. Reposting the original offense alongside an apology asks your audience to relive the mistake. Say what you mean now, plainly, and move on.
The bottom line
The strategy behind a decision and the language used to announce it are not the same test, and passing one doesn’t mean you’ve passed the other. The leaders who grow revenue systematically are the ones who build a habit of asking who besides the intended audience will hear these exact words — before the words leave the building.
References
Airbnb Newsroom. (2020, May 5). A message from co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky. https://news.airbnb.com/a-message-from-co-founder-and-ceo-brian-chesky/
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.
Bloomberg News. (2026a, May 22). StanChart CEO Bill Winters apologizes for “lower-value” comments after outcry. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-22/stanchart-ceo-apologizes-for-lower-value-comments-after-outcry
Bloomberg News. (2026b, May 21). StanChart fields regulator queries after CEO’s “lower-value human capital” remark. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-21/stanchart-fields-regulator-queries-after-ceo-s-ai-comments
Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97(5), 1232–1254.
Fortune. (2024, June 3). Brian Chesky reflects on how the pandemic challenged his family motto for Airbnb. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2024/06/03/airbnb-ceo-reflects-on-fumbled-messaging-during-layoffs-you-dont-fire-members-of-your-family/
Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. Random House.
Kelly, J. (2020, May 6). Airbnb lays off 25% of its employees: CEO Brian Chesky gives a master class in empathy and compassion. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/05/06/airbnb-lays-off-25-of-its-employees-ceo-brian-chesky-gives-a-master-class-in-empathy-and-compassion/
Kruse, K. (2026, July 2). A CEO called his employees “lower-value human capital.” His apology is an emotional intelligence lesson. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2026/07/02/a-ceo-called-his-employees-lower-value-human-capital-his-apology-is-an-emotional-intelligence-lesson/
Newton, E. L. (1990). The rocky road from actions to intentions [Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University].
Pinker, S. (2014). The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. Viking.
Zillman, C. (2026, May 28). Boos, AI-washing, and “low-value human capital”: The psychological traps CEOs are falling into when they botch their AI messaging. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/ceos-ai-messaging-mistakes-bill-winters-low-value/
