Accordng to this weekend’s Australian Financial Review, corporate executioners have a tough time [payment required]. On one level, chriscurnow.com finds it pretty hard to work up a lot of sympathy for people who wield the axe in corporations. They take the money, they suffer for it. They don’t have to do it. (Well perhaps someone does have to be responsible for layoffs in many instances. However, at least if it was done with real human concern for and connection with the victims it would be a totally different experience for all concerned.)
The AFR piece does show that people can’t behave in subhuman ways without affecting themselves. It shows that the modern culture of downsizing negatively affects everyone involved – including the donwsizers themselves.
chriscurnow.com argues that in at least most cases it also negatively affects the downsized corporation as the survivors feel both guilt at surviving in place of the victims and an increased and ever present sense of their own corporate mortality.
Sure, we’ve learned that the sharemarket will generally appluad the CEO who is prepared to make “the hard decisions”. But can anyone argue that the sharemarket is a rational being capable of discerning even the medium term impacts of today’s actions?
It’s going back a while now, but Jerry Harvey wrote a powerful piece about downsizing in 1988 in The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management. He devotes a chapter of his book to this topic, comparing downsizing to the holocaust. Harvey argued that it could only occur because otherwise decent people allowed it to. People were afraid to stand up to the Nazis and often, even Jews became collaborators.
chriscurnow.com believes there are times when downsizing is necessary. When a company’s market collapses it can’t continue to pay people. However we can’t agree with corporations who bring in the army of 25 year old management consultants to show them how to remain competitive and simply accept their advice to ‘reduce labour costs’.
If it is the very last resort after every other avenue has been explored, when any necessary reductions are kept to an absolute minimum and when departures are handled with all compassion and dignity we can find, well maybe. But then, when was the last time you heard of a downsizing effort that looked like this?