Shockproof: How to Hardwire Your Business for Lasting Success

Chapter 4. Beyond boxes and Lines

All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get.

—Arthur Jones

Nurse, Scalpel Please

The period 2008 to 2009 was a tough one for many companies, as growth in the global economy hit the brakes and slowed to a crawl. It was an equally difficult period for employees, as well, especially for former employees. In Jason Reitman's movie Up in the Air, the George Clooney character, Ryan Bingham, is literally a high-flying professional who enjoys the trappings of airplane travel and his job as a "career transition" counselor. He flies all over the United States handing out pink slips to employees whose managers don't have the courage to pull the trigger themselves. The movie has a comedic tone, but it begins on a serious note, with a series of talking heads reflecting on their recent misfortune. And if they seem all too real, it's because they are. They aren't Hollywood actors, but real people, who had in fact been laid off across the United States during the 2008 recession.

Unfortunately, whether at the hands of a career transition specialist or, more humanely, an HR or line manager, this story has played out all too often in real life, across the globe, since 2008. Alarmingly, in 2009, the Fortune 500 alone shed 761,422 employees, through a combination of downsizing, spinoffs, and attrition.^[35] Of course, in tough times layoffs are not an unexpected event, but their sheer volume, and the cold fact that the Fortune 500 experienced this ...