Every Friday at 4pm, our CEO sends a company-wide email: "This Week at [Company]." Three wins, one chart, a closing line about momentum. We'd like to translate it, section by section, because the format is doing more work managing perception than it is reporting facts.
"Three Wins This Week"
The wins are real. They are also selected from everything that happened across the entire company that week, which means the email is, by construction, a highlight reel — three good things, chosen specifically because they're good, presented with no corresponding section for the three things that went badly, which also happened, same week, same company. Nobody's lying about the wins. The dishonesty, if there is any, is entirely in the selection, not the content.
The chart
One metric, trending the right direction, screenshotted directly from the dashboard with forty tiles behind it. This is the same selection problem as the wins section, applied to data: the metric chosen is the one that looks good this week, and if it looked bad, a different metric would have appeared instead, quietly, without anyone needing to say "we're changing which number we show you."
"Shoutouts"
Named individually, these are real and mean something to the people named — nobody should discount the genuine morale value of being publicly thanked in front of the whole company. The selection problem is smaller here, mostly because shoutouts are crowdsourced from manager nominations rather than curated top-down, which makes this section the most honest one in the email, almost by accident, since the format didn't filter it so much as aggregate it.
"A Note From Leadership"
This is where the email does its real work. A paragraph, usually from the CEO, that reframes whatever's actually hard about the current moment into language suggesting it's part of a plan. A slow quarter becomes "a focused, disciplined period." A missed deadline becomes "we're taking the time to get this right." The note is never dishonest about outcomes — it's reliably honest about what happened — but it's doing constant, careful work on how what happened should be felt, which is a different kind of labor than reporting.
"Momentum" as the closing word
Nearly every version of this email ends with some variant of the word "momentum" — building momentum, strong momentum, momentum into next quarter. This word is doing enormous, almost entirely unfalsifiable work. Nobody can point to a specific metric called "momentum." It can't be checked, can't be disproven in the moment, and functions as pure forward-leaning affect, attached to the end of the email specifically because it's the last thing people read and the thing most likely to set the tone they carry into the weekend.
Why the format persists even when things are genuinely rough
Because stopping the email, or visibly changing its tone, is itself a signal — employees notice absence and tonal shifts faster than they notice content. A company having a hard quarter has a strong incentive to keep sending the exact same cheerful format, at the exact same cadence, specifically because any visible deviation would tell the room more than the actual content of a harder email would. The format's consistency is doing reassurance work independent of whatever's actually inside it that week.
What we're not saying
We're not saying this email is dishonest — everything in it is usually true, and the genuine function of celebrating real wins and thanking real people is worth preserving regardless of what else is happening. We're saying the format systematically selects for good news and reframes hard news, which means an employee reading only this email, every week, for a year, would end up with a picture of the company that's directionally accurate but reliably rosier than the full truth.
Our recommendation
Keep the format. Just occasionally let a hard week be a hard week in writing — one honest sentence about what didn't go well does more for trust than a year of flawless momentum ever will, and it costs the format nothing to include.
If your own Friday email hasn't mentioned a real setback in longer than you can remember, email us at contact@b2bsaas.guru. We'll help you write the honest version. We'll probably still end it with "momentum."