The Confession Letter

Want Want's latest layoffs: the number to watch isn't 1,000.

Two other details matter more.

One is what chairman Tsai Eng-ming wrote in his internal letter. The company had "lived a good life for nearly 30 years on just a few flagship products." It had "failed to innovate and adapt." Its partnership model with distributors had "not kept up with the times." Three sentences from the top decision-maker. Dense enough to fill three PowerPoint slides justifying the cuts.

The other is the self-assessment notice issued the same week. All headquarters employees were required to write a report on their past year's performance, "honestly and objectively dissecting their shortcomings." The notice laid out a five-part mantra: truly know yourself, truly reflect on yourself, constantly remind yourself, firmly grasp yourself, and absolutely realize yourself. Corporate-culture boilerplate. Then came the supplementary clause at the bottom: "Unit heads are not required to participate."

Put the two documents side by side.

The chairman admits to thirty years without innovation. The company mandates a dissection of everyone's shortcomings—except management. Product obsolescence came from management's product roadmap. Channel lag came from management's signed-off strategy. The profit crash falls under management's KPI accountability. Homework goes out to everyone. The same people grade it. The graders don't have to turn in their own papers.

This isn't reflection. This is a scapegoat mechanism.

The numbers are cold. Q1 fiscal 2026: revenue down 6% year-on-year. Net profit down 38%. Traditional wholesale channels in double-digit decline. Behind each number is a decision. What new categories did Want Want launch in the past decade beyond puffed rice cakes and sweetened milk drinks? The snack sector moved from supermarket shelves to discount variety stores to Douyin livestreams. How many rounds of distributor margin compression has Want Want absorbed? A store-level rep can't answer those questions. They can decide to display two extra packs of Snowy Rice Cakes today. They cannot decide that Snowy Rice Cakes have been on the market for thirty years.

They are exactly the ones required to write self-assessments.

The notice says "truly know yourself." Know what? Know you couldn't reverse a trend with an aging product? Know you couldn't win today's price war with a thirty-year-old channel playbook? If "truly knowing yourself" means discovering you failed at things outside your control, the assessment is asking someone who wasn't driving to write the accident report.

The executive exemption sharpens the logic. A company-wide reflection mechanism that systematically excludes the top tier tells you the designers know exactly what they're doing. Genuine reflection costs something. It might point to strategic errors. Personnel misjudgments. Even the "failures" the chairman himself named. Management doesn't want to pay that cost. Reflection that points to ordinary employees' poor execution is cheap. One notice. A stack of forms. A few names crossed off.

Look at what other companies did during the same period. Porsche China offered N+6. Mercedes-Benz Germany gave senior managers up to €500,000. Bridgestone, closing a plant, brought seven companies in to hold job-matching fairs on-site. ByteDance added transition subsidies on top of statutory N+1. JD.com, during its transformation, stated it "would not fire anyone." Common thread: the company owns the cost of its missteps or industry headwinds. Departing employees leave with money and dignity.

Want Want chose a different path. The payout hasn't been disclosed. The self-assessment form has already gone out. An adult, told they might be laid off, is asked to hand-write a document listing, point by point, where they fell short. Fact-based. Data-supported. Honest. Objective. They submit it. The person who doesn't have to write a self-assessment grades it. Decides who stays and who goes.

After this process, what did the company gain? Possibly leverage in severance negotiations—you admitted your shortcomings, so a finding of "incompetence" becomes easier to sustain. What they lost is in plain sight. When an incumbent employee watches a departing colleague hand in a confession before leaving, what do they think about the rules of this game?

Where does that self-assessment form end up? Filed. In the HR system. Never opened again. But it existed. It proves one thing. In 2026, a thirty-year-old national brand, faced with its own mistakes, decided the people who made no mistakes should sign a confession.

That's the detail not to miss.