Klarna

• My team members and immediate manager.
• Great opportunity for individual learning and personal development.
• Salaries for new employees.

• Chaotic, unfocused top leadership whose deliverables for their teams change seemingly on a monthly basis. This is not helped by the CEO, who leads the charge on this scatterbrained approach to goal-setting.
• A frankly unqualified COO who personifies the 'Peter Principle'.
• Again at the C-level, too much focus on pleasing the CEO and demo-ing shiny new projects and initiatives, rather than setting tangible, achievable, realistic goals. This leads to chaos for the rank employees and line managers because of ever-changing priorities.
• Some really unethical business practices like hiring new employees into a pool where they have no defined job, then letting them go after 5.5 months - just before the end of their probation period. Or layoffs of entire departments because of a project deliverable that the CEO didn't like.
• A CEO who's a fanboy of Elon Musk and copies his worst tactics: viewing employees as disposable wipes, union-busting, lying about the company's outlook (for example the public hype about Klarna's huge reliance on and massive gains from AI is viewed very differently by internal employees who know the truth).
• Poor opportunity for internal growth. This is largely a failure of the HR department, which has never clearly defined objective measures of employee performance reviews.

It's hard to see how Klarna will improve with the current unfocused top management team. Dissent is not tolerated, especially if you ever dare question the almighty CEO.

Surprisingly, Klarna succeeds because of the lower-level managers and line employees. They are the ones who execute the company's mission and take care of customers and operations.