Arianna Huffington Quotes

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.

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.

In business, sometimes you have to change the CEO in order to change the direction of the company.

While Safeco's turnaround is one of the greatest things I have ever participated in, the heart-wrenching decisions to let people go will stay with me forever.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes people have a hard time believing that a company is intentionally trying to make itself smaller.

A restructuring of an organisation is always a difficult time and delicate.

When I came into the CEO office, I basically changed the entire management team. We knew that we had to change the company, so we needed a new set of leaders.

In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.

I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.

So in 2000, when we changed the business model and started really focusing on that triangle and putting the customer in the center, we decided we should hold off - we've done enough consolidation; we've got enough critical mass.

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.

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

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.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

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

If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.

After the non-Japanese Carlos Ghosn was brought in by Nissan to turn around the struggling auto manufacturer, he made English the company's official working language.

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.

You can fire your workers, close your factories, export your jobs overseas, and get a tax deduction for doing it.

Our wage freeze was vital to keep wages competitive with rival companies. I always try to communicate to our people that we can never make enough money. We can never make enough profit.

I was one of the early folks at eBay, and by 1999, it was completely overrun by consultants from McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. It went from being a cool, fun startup to an MBA factory.