How Layoffs Affect Family and Business Productivity

It seems appropriate this week to post about how layoffs affect work and family. At IBM the employees have lived with constant layoffs--called resource actions in IBM speak, since Lou Gerstner took over the company in 1993.

This is one example of how Gerstner's elephant--and that of his successor's, "danced" on the livelihoods of their employees.

These are examples of three layoffs at IBM, not during hard times but when times were supposedly good.

What are resource actions? They are as hard to explain as they are to experience, and IBM employees have been experiencing them for almost three decades. These two articles (extracted from journal entries) are critical to understanding why IBM's sales and profit productivity have fallen so drastically in the 21st Century.

Here are three resource actions … in action.

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These are chapters from Peter E. Greulich's "A View from Beneath the Dancing Elephant" a different perspective from Lou Gerstner's "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?"

It explains why IBM's employee productivity has been dropping for more than two decades.

It seems our corporate leadership should be reading this.

Two Examples of How Layoffs--Resource Actions, Affect Work and Family.