Corporate Downsizing Quotes

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

Back in the '80s and '90s, when GM was consistently posting giant profits, they were simultaneously firing tens of thousands of workers in my hometown of Flint and across Michigan.

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

I was a corporate hatchet man, and it's impossible for me to turn that off. It's this curse when I walk into businesses: 'That needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed.'

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

Why are CEO's who slash jobs so proud of themselves? Instead of bragging about 'cutting fat,' they ought to be getting up before their employees and saying, We did such a lousy job of planning and hiring that we have more people than work. And we are so broke and so dim-witted that we can't come up with any way to get more work. So our only solution is to send a lot of good people home. I am ashamed and I am sorry.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, laid off over 100,000 employees. His reward? When he retired from GE, he received a golden parachute of over $400 million dollars. This is the kind of corporate greed and irresponsibility that is destroying the middle class and must be ended.

Top-rank global corporations are collapsing. That could happen sometime, and somehow even to Samsung.

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.

In this industry, the new owners prefer to kill anything they weren't responsible for.

Nothing kills your company's culture like layoffs.

Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue . . . The New York Times captured the new corporate order succinctly in 1987, reporting that... 'All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter'.

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.

Great companies have been reduced by hiring executives that don't work out.

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

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.