James Surowiecki Quotes

But I don't want massive layoffs of anyone - public or private. We are planning on shrinking government through attrition and reform, not through random pink slips.

Things are bad in 2001 at Yahoo. There's been layoffs, restructuring, lots of people left.

We will downsize the government, motivate excess employees to become entrepreneurs, and increase the pay of a lean and mean bureaucracy.

We held the team together for as long as possible and then sent all except the most critical personnel home.

From a productivity standpoint, you're supposed to reduce headcount on par with declining revenue. If you believe the environment isn't going to improve, you should take a bigger cut to get in front of the problems.

From the very first time I talked to Safeco employees, I said the reality was expenses were too high and the reality is two-thirds of our expenses are people, so the reality is there will be effects on people.

There is no denying that downsizing can happen when a company receives private equity funding. It is unfortunate and hard on everyone who is affected.

The corporate killer downsizing is directly responsive to what the mutual funds have wanted.

We ran three cars last year. Unfortunately, as time went on, we did have to let a few people go, which we regretted, but just because of the situation.

We've lost 400,000 jobs in Michigan because of downsizing.

Consolidation means less equipment, less networks, and less jobs.

I have been reorganizing and restructuring AOL: changing the strategy and rebuilding it from scratch in the worst economy in a generation.

The IT bubble is the IT bubble, and of course, we became a company that contracted dramatically in 2001 and 2002: we basically came down by 45,000 people - a dramatic ramp-down.

Prune - prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

Tough times helped many commodities producers become lean and mean through consolidation, mergers and cost-cutting. All that excess supply has been sopped up.

You have to ask what is going to happen to a lot of companies when there is not a lot more money to be gotten. That changes everybody's perspective, I think.

A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late '80s agreed that 'employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.' A decade later, only 6 percent agreed. It was in the '90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

We wanted to preserve as many jobs as possible, so when our sales continued to decline in August 2008, we did about a 5 percent reduction of our global staff. But in order not to cut any more jobs, we froze everybody's pay and put a hiring freeze on.

Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.

Strong managers who make tough decisions to cut jobs provide the only true job security in today's world. Weak managers are the problem. Weak managers destroy jobs.

You know, in a workplace, when you shrink the size of a workforce, there is pain there. But there is no question: we have a government that we can no longer afford. That is the cold, hard fact. So we have to make this more efficient. We have to sunset programs that no longer work. We have to eliminate waste and fraud. We must do this.

The two words, in the American lexicon, are never good. Pink slip. The first time I ever heard it when I was young was when Kaiser Steel handed out pink slips to many of my neighbors and relatives. Layoffs were about efficiency, sales figures for raw materials or refrigerators.

The only way to make budget cuts is to bring down force structure.

I think there are several departments we could completely get rid of, and we wouldn't miss it.