Related Posts
How to get project in Xorient?
More Posts
4 Years Yesterday!
One day at a time.
Additional Posts in Consulting
Book recommendations for new executives?
I miss the corporate welfare of all my free mealz
What should partners stop doing?
New to Fishbowl?
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
1. Sometimes it's part of the job. It definitely deserves your full attention and highest quality/care. 2. Client is going to do it with you or without you. Hopefully your involvement means the reductions are more surgical. 3. Often, we recognize the need before they do. That creates more options to organize for effectiveness and growth... Rather than panicked plant closings later. Tl;dr - market forces are what they. Hopefully we help clients react more quickly and less rashly.
Unfortunately, you have to emotionally separate. You have to see it as 1) losing a few can save many, 2) you are not the one doing the reduction, and 3) you have to focus on the job at hand, which is what you were hired to do, since you need to keep yourself employed.
You're redeploying unproductive or under-productive capital from one part of the business (e.g. Backoffice) hopefully to profit centers like new business lines. It still sucks but try to think of the new opportunities/jobs that will be created directly or indirectly from the work you're doing. Or of the clients leadership is a bunch of lazy assholes they may just take the run rate savings and up their dividend. But don't think about that option.
@A1 - Not sure how increasing shareholder returns equates to being an asshole. Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to do just that. Grandma's pension money is tied up in that stock or in mutual funds that hold it. In fact, that's why executives are incentivized with stock options.
If*
It doesn't BCG 1. It's just a lazy way of doing it and I would prefer a company I'm investing in to be reinvesting in themselves and potential driving much larger returns for investors in the form of appreciation rather than a one time payout of an extra $0.10 per share in this years dividend. In other words it's not the objective but the means of execution that I disagree with.
Sometimes the objectively right strategy is to milk the business for cash. Too many companies have a grow or die mentality when the responsible move (albeit not sexy) is to sit back and print money until the inevitable happens... or to break up. "Be number one or number two in every market, and fix, sell, or close to get there" is the only-mildly-hyperbolic mantra from Jack Welch. He wasn't wrong.
Labor arbitrage is part of what we do,
If you can't objectively advise on proper sizing you're in the wrong practice
You do not in this country have a right to a job, only to pursue happiness and not be denied or life or liberty without due process