Gotta Love Those Layoffs

Unemployment hit the highest point in 20 years. We’re talking about 10.2% for October. That is 1 in 10 people not employed… and this doesn’t include those who don’t even care about eating dinner from a trash dumpster. These are individuals that have been laid off or fired.

So, why are there layoffs? Are these companies who are making the layoffs still making money? A lot are… so once again, why are there layoffs?

Layoffs are the laziest way to improve the company quarterly dashboards. You can get rid of the “close to retirement” folks (making the most money, right?), maybe a few “should have been fired years ago” turkeys (wait, Bob is still here), and a few random people to say it was “all fair!” That’s like $10 million or the CEO’s jet fuel budget.

Here at OCC, we have debated the layoff issue for years now… mainly because we went through layoffs in our past (Was that Bill who just got walked out or Tom? Tom owes me $20, dang it!) and came up with alternatives to layoffs… things that might take longer to do, but could stop the bleeding.

(1) Kill the “ugly” pet products early – these items steal the lunch money of un-suspected innocent projects that could make a difference. Pet projects work 5% of the time anyway and only makes the uppity manager looks good (professionally speaking of course).

(2) Have processes that work and improve yields/outcomes for current operations – this is money that is being lost every day whether there are employees or not. “Oh, so what if we throw out $100,000 worth of product a week, we the write-offs have to come from somewhere!”

(3) Stop moving the factories – This cost savings is never about the future of the people, only the future of the stock (and none of us have much of that). You lose experienced, good people and the cost of constructing new buildings, training new workers, and the mountain of other “to-do’s” can’t be realized if the factory moves every 8 years. It sounds like a good idea, right? That’s until the Chinese steal your blue prints, make a factory identical to yours next door, out sell and produce your factory, and eventually makes your company go belly-up. Shazaam!

If you are going to have layoffs, start at the top and work down… you’ll get to the amount needed quicker! Let’s face it… we have all had directors of no-one, managers of managers, and conceptual leaders of nonsense.

Most importantly though, those companies who don’t layoff and manage through it, are better after the hard times.

Lastly, You can’t have a company without its people… and people are always the biggest asset to a company… so if we layoff a company’s biggest asset, that leaves the rest of us with a lot of ugly pet projects to get done. I think its time to move to China!

Japan vs. US – a funny story

Welcome World to the Organized Chaos Comic Blog. We hope that this website will be useful, informative, and down-right funny. For our first blog posting, we decided on a good belly laugh. Until next week…

**********************************************************************************

Team dynamics are always a challenge… especially in a very hierarchical business environment. When you have five bosses and twelve different strategies to get the same thing done, the job becomes a complete disaster. We have seen this time and time again.

The collapse of business is why the following joke was so funny to us when we first saw it a number of years ago. The story has been told in infinite ways (Puerto Ricans vs. Cubans, Company A vs. Company B, etc.) but our personal favorite is the US company vs. the Japanese company. Enjoy!

A Japanese company and a United States company decided to have a canoe race, to prove once and for all who was better. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance before the race.

The big day came and the Japanese won by a mile.

Immediately afterwards, the US team became very discouraged and depressed. The senior management of the US company decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be known. A “Discovery Team,” made up of mid-level management, was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate actions.

Their conclusion was that the Japanese team had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the US team had 1 person rowing and 8 people steering.

The US senior management, not completely confident of the conclusion, hired a consulting company and paid them an incredible sum of money. After investigating the loss, the consultant group advised that too many people were steering the boat and not enough people were rowing.

To prevent losing to the Japanese again the next year, the rowing team’s management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 3 area steering managers, and 1 steering director. They also implemented a new performance reward system that would give the 1 person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the “Rowing Team Quality First Program,” with meetings and dinners for the management team and free pens for the rower. The hope was to empower the rower through enrichment and rewards.

The next year the Japanese won by 2 miles. Humiliated, the US management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. They then used the money saved to give a High Performance Award to the steering management and distributed the rest of the money as bonuses to the senior executives.