Another month, another 10,000 dot-commers overboard.
Chances are, you once brandished the sword that's now poking at your posterior. But don't think about this now. Humiliation is the least of your worries when you walk the plank.
As you stare into the icy waters beneath your toes, pause to consider the moral righteousness of layoffs. Your sacrifice will serve the greater good of your company, the well-being of colleagues and shareholders. You are an unfortunate but random casualty of the new economy's growing fits. Ultimately your unemployment will enable personal growth, an opportunity to expand your horizons.
You can practice your moose call, for example, while sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring.
Layoffs have never been a painless proposition. But not so long ago at least you understood the rules. These days, companies no longer slash jobs because of unforeseen market conditions, foreign competition, or rising prices. They sacrifice them as a religious rite to appease the Green-Wad gods on Wall Street.
Shareholder value now dominates not only long-term strategy at most companies, but minute-to-minute managerial decisions. Executive careers can wash away with a six-week price slump. Market jitters can send senior management scrambling for life rafts.
To keep the gods happy, devout companies first slash their payrolls to pump up next quarter's profits, hoping that maybe just maybe wind will fill the sails for a month or two. They can always hire back when the gods are appeased. Just-in-time manufacturing meets just-in-time employment.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with Net companies. Dot-com layoffs jumped 23 percent in January to a record 12,828—the seventh month in a row for mounting cutbacks and shutdown announcements. The latest round of Internet bloodletting includes marchFirst, J.P. Morgan Chase's Morgan OnLine, Cambridge Technology Partners, and discount broker Ameritrade. These came days after similar cuts at the online units of The New York Times and News Corporation.
Big, blubbery companies can still get some mileage from layoffs. When GE, DaimlerChrysler, Xerox, and Office Depot unveiled deep cuts across their workforces earlier this year, investors celebrated. Lose the lard, shed the flab.
But Internet outfits can't go slaughtering their employees willy-nilly. After all, most dot-coms put computers to work where feeble humans have traditionally toiled. Payrolls are already lean. The economy's spectacular rise in productivity is a testament to efficiencies of small staffs.
Layoffs should signal to investors that a company is finally serious about putting profits ahead of growth, that its management is nimble enough to mend its inefficient ways. But layoff announcements from pure-play Internet companies too often precede Chapter 7 announcements. The lag from desperate to hopeless is typically less than six months. Layoffs have become a last-ditch effort to beseech the gods - to buy time - while company managers figure out how to turn a buck. Worse, they are an admission that the firm can't meet its payroll. Either way, the gods are not pleased.
Nor are the sacrificial lambs, many of whom bet big that their stock options would offset the risks of joining a startup. Once share values dip below the strike price, resume's go out.
If all this weren't sufficiently gloomy, there's retribution to consider. The talent that a company sheds often pools to become its competitor. Barriers to entry on the Internet are still astoundingly low. Managers who believe the new economy has rewritten the rules on labor relations have a rude surprise in store. They're begging to become fish food.
