Lay offs
The sound of corporate inevitability
It’s one of the most dreaded but increasingly frequent phenomena in corporate enterprises these days.
Lay offs.
An intriguingly awkward name given after years of softening and humanizing an action in which you’re telling someone they’re no longer needed here.
It definitely switches off the pay spigot, what exactly it lays is unclear.
If you’ve worked long enough, you’ve likely experienced one, and while you may complete a fruitful career without being a victim of one, you will most certainly reach your expiry date at retirement, the ultimate form of celebrated redundancy.
My first experience with them was putting together the affliction list, almost 20 years ago to the day.
We were advising a fund that just bought a billion-dollar company on exciting avenues for growth.
This was the best kind of work — someone with lots of money, spending it on something, and then spending more to make that thing better.
Until they decided to buy a company four times the size of the first, and now wanted the ‘synergies’ to justify the deal.
Finding the human part of those synergies landed in my lap, and here’s how it happened.
Manager, all frantic: “Did you see the announcement, they just bought a 4 billion dollar company without telling us?!?”
Me, after gulping down my half-chewed mouthful of chocolate covered espresso beans: “Who did?”
Manager: “Our client”
(I’ll stop saying who says what because it alternates and it’s self-explanatory) “Oh, ok. That’s great, that means we have more things to grow!”
“Not really, they want synergies”
“Synergies!”
“Yes, have you ever done one of those?”
“No, I haven’t. I have gotten people fired because they sucked at what they did but I’ve never done synergies before”
“Neither have I, you know the business better than I do, give it a shot”
And that is how I became the custodian of two Excel files, one roughly 4x the size of the other, with tenure, salary, location, function, brief role description, and a unique identifier in place of their name (to prevent inherent bias and dehumanize the exercise).
After deploying some pivoting, goal seek, and some basic logic, the much-heralded 20% overhead synergies were achieved.
I shipped the file to my manager with an accompanying ‘synergies approach’ presentation, and a few weeks later, the announcement was made.
One of those impacted was the founder and CEO of the first company.
I don’t remember his name, but we got to be friendly during the first phase of the project, given our mandate, his recent payout, and his continued employment.
The following conversation I had with him stuck with me to this day.
He was given another handsome payout and a celebratory exit, because unless you are in some strange tech startups or at a fund large enough to justify having ‘co-CEOs’, you only need one of those.
In our last conversation, his jubilation had faded, and he was morose and saddened like he had just lost a child or received a terminal diagnosis.
I asked him, in as polite and empathetic a manner as I could manage, about the reason for his sadness. I had known how much he was paid, and at my young age it was a princely sum that I would have willingly sacrificed a pinky or another useless organ for.
He gathered his thoughts and looked at me like I was crazy and said:
“They took away the one thing I spent my entire life building, and they didn’t even ask my opinion”
Or something to that effect.
Since that episode, I have orchestrated, been a part of, or avoided countless layoffs.
I’d never had the pleasure of receiving the good kind, where you are told that you or your group are no longer necessary, and offered a cushy severance to tide you over until your next role, but I’ve done many others for the sake of efficiency, or simply because we weren’t making enough money.
Enough being the key here, because no matter how objective you want to make it sound, it is still subjective.
Last year’s performance, expected future performance, your peer benchmark, your competition, investor demands, promises you or your superiors made while under the influence of mass euphoria or because the timing is so long in the future you probably won’t be there, or simply the fact that you can just do it, make some more money for a few quarters, see what happens, then course correct with more hirings or firings if you need to.
It is the beauty of corporate calamities, you can always blame your predecessor, order a massive cleanup, bring in your affiliates, and go through the cycle all over again, then climb up the ladder or move somewhere else and let others do the same.
I don’t really have an issue with layoffs, they are just one more card in the quasi-pyramid scheme that has become the modern corporation.
There are too many humans involved with doing things, and humans by nature are scattered and inefficient. When things are going well and you’re making more money, the general tendency is to hire more humans to do more things.
More humans begets more humans, more problems, and more inefficiencies, so eventually a clean up is required. Much like a closet accumulating clothes for different seasons.
And frankly, some people are just vile, entitled, and self-centered and deserve it, but these are the exception rather than the rule.
Whenever someone tells me they just got the call, I think about that CEO. He’d built a billion dollars of something and still walked out looking like he’d been to a funeral, because nobody asked him. If he didn’t get asked, you won’t either.
He wasn’t wrong, and I didn’t have an answer for him then. I’m not sure I do now.
