Responsible Restructuring

4The Case for Responsible Restructuring

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Instead of asking, “What’s the irreducible core number of people we need to run our business?” responsible restructuring asks, “How can we change the way we do business, so that we can use the people we currently have most effectively?”

As we saw in chapter 2, a pure employment downsizing approach, which changes the number of people without changing the way work is done, generally does not produce the long-term effects its proponents had hoped for. In contrast, many companies are “responsibly restructuring”—relying on their workers to provide sustained competitive advantage and adopting a wide range of practices, such as these:

• Skills training and continuous learning
• Information sharing
• Employee participation ...