J&J announced today that they were cutting jobs about 7%. I know buisness is business and all that but here is the issue: 7% seems like an arbitrary number - what we in advertising call a "funny number".
If you took J&J's 118,000 workforce and you went through it job by job to see who could go, who is going to go into retirement, etc., and came up with 8,260 employees that they can do without that is one thing. if they found that since revenues were down 5% and that 5% equaled 7% of jobs that is quite another.
My conundrum is that management slip ups, bad calls, wrong decisions, etc., that lead to a drop in revenue is reveresed by firing someone at Christmas time or the Holidays or whatever. It still doesn't absolve the management errors that started things.
Nokia also noted a 5,700 job cut. This comes as a result of a 21% decline in sales. So let me get this straight. All kinds of people will loose their jobs because marketing screwed up?
That is the point of this writing. The simple thing to do is to cut jobs and no matter how you sugar coat it, people will hit the street at the worst possible time. That happens of course as business is business but how do you say "I screwed up in my forecasting so you are fired"?
If you took J&J's 118,000 workforce and you went through it job by job to see who could go, who is going to go into retirement, etc., and came up with 8,260 employees that they can do without that is one thing. if they found that since revenues were down 5% and that 5% equaled 7% of jobs that is quite another.
My conundrum is that management slip ups, bad calls, wrong decisions, etc., that lead to a drop in revenue is reveresed by firing someone at Christmas time or the Holidays or whatever. It still doesn't absolve the management errors that started things.
Nokia also noted a 5,700 job cut. This comes as a result of a 21% decline in sales. So let me get this straight. All kinds of people will loose their jobs because marketing screwed up?
That is the point of this writing. The simple thing to do is to cut jobs and no matter how you sugar coat it, people will hit the street at the worst possible time. That happens of course as business is business but how do you say "I screwed up in my forecasting so you are fired"?
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