I predict that it won't be long before people look once again at the career of Jack Welch. Most of the time, when it was done in the runup to his selection of Immelt as his replacement at GE, the outlook was sunny. Not too long ago people forgot that he was once known as 'Neutron Jack'.
I myself am trying to take a longer view and try to remember how bad things were when they were bad. What I recall, especially in the days when any idiot with two years of HTML and ColdFusion under their belt was considered a startup genius, was that there was a time in America when business management mattered. Not creative MBA tricks and the sort of souped up financial sophistication - but Lou Grant -style management. What we used to call MBWA. Management by walking around. Meaning touching people talking to people, motivating people, hands-on stuff where people felt good about working for that rare thing we call a 'management team'.
Being a consultant, I know some of the things that happened to management teams, and it wasn't all good. But it began with the pennywise decision to outsource. I'm not protectionist by a longshot. My gripe with outsourcing is that it disembowels business knowledge from the core of the physical company. Amazon.com is a virtual company - let it reign. But most companies are not virtual companies and they shouldn't be. And we're all going to find that out the hard way in a short matter of time. Shrinkage is not just a joke from Seinfeld.
So this means that a lot of managers who aren't Jack Welch are going to be faced with making the same kind of tough decisions that Jack Welch made in the early 80s. It's not just the 'proverbial' hardest thing a manager does, it's the real deal hardest thing. Laying off people who don't deserve being let go because they are lazy or stupid or unethical, but because the company simply can't afford to keep them on payroll and must cut costs. Jack Welch was smart, and returned his company to profitability big time. But all of us aren't so smart about restructuring and strategically wise cost-cutting. A lot of us will gut ourselves in the process us cutting fat. A lot of us will depopulate, not without anguish, but without strategic smarts. Just because it hurts to lay people off, doesn't mean the pain is over, especially if you do it incorrectly.
I might use all of the above verbiage to preface a sales pitch for the kind of management consulting I do. But it's simply the truth. It won't be long before lots of bosses come home ashen from the grief associated with sending people off the payroll. It could be you that does the sending. It could be you that gets sent away. But when people start singing "You Send Me", it won't be to their darlings.
I'm going to dust off my copy of 'Good to Great'. Downsizing is not going to be easy.
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