N. Robert Hammer Quotes

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Nothing kills your company's culture like layoffs.

Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.

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.

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

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

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.

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.

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

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

I was fired from my television job, simple as that. Well, downsized, really, a classic 1990s situation.

However, the economics of our business continued to deteriorate. We barely escaped bankruptcy a year ago, and in the aftermath of that escape we had to make some even tougher decisions.

When I arrived at Campbell on January 8, 2001, the company had lost half its market value in the prior year. They had to cut costs to the point where they were literally taking the chicken out of chicken noodle soup and the product was no longer competitive.

So laying people off is not something I do lightly, it's not something I relish.

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.

What I do feel is that 'Up in the Air' is the most indicative film of 2009. It is the portrait of 2009.

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.

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