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The
Radin Report
Published monthly,
our free e-mail newsletter contains sensor industry news and career
commentary. To subscribe, simply
send us your e-mail address.
The Future is Now
Will technology experience
20,000 years of growth in the next century? Futurist
Ray Kurzweil thinks so.
Tribute to a Sensor Industry Giant
When
Emory Farr handed over the keys to Sensortronics in early 2002, a
generational torch was passed—and with it, leadership qualities that are
absent in today’s corporate culture.
Crash
Diets: The Cure for Overweight Companies?
Given the enormous costs of recruiting and training employees, it’s
surprising that so many companies are purging themselves so quickly of their
valuable talent resources.
How
Effective is Your Capture Strategy?
In the war for talent, you may
know how to wine and dine the talent you need. But as a manager, are you
able
to actually
consummate the deal?
Intelligence
Failure Costly to Employers
If
the syntax used in the employment game could be improved, employers would
save millions of hours—and
dollars.
Merger
Mania Hits the Sensor Industry
Sensor companies may lack
celebrity status, but they’re no less active than the highest profile
companies when it comes to shuffling the deck.
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Crash
Diets: The Cure for Overweight Companies?
By Bill Radin
Corporate layoffs are like
weight loss programs, at least in theory. Carrying around less fat leads
to better health, which results in increased levels of energy and
productivity.
But is weight loss always a
good thing? Not if it reaches the point of cutting muscle, instead of fat.
Given the enormous costs of
recruiting and training employees, it’s surprising that so many
companies are purging themselves so quickly of their valuable talent
resources. Even in a recession (or whatever the economists are calling
it), you’d think companies would hang on a bit longer before cashing in
their chips.
But old habits die hard,
especially in the face of shareholder pressure to maintain corporate
earnings at all costs. Hoping that across-the-board staff reductions will
cure what ails them and mollify Wall Street, giant corporations are
predictably repeating their knee-jerk reaction to disappointing earnings
by announcing major layoffs. Only this time around, the strategy of
cutting staff may have lost much of its edge.
Indiscriminate job cuts have
the same effect as throwing the baby out with the bath water. But even
more harmful to corporate health is the practice of liquidating assets
that are certain to fall into the hands of the competition. When a company
lays off a top-producing engineer or salesman, that person will naturally
drift toward the competition, infusing the other side with years of
product knowledge and longstanding customer relationships.
Front-Line
Recession Fighters
Luckily, there’s a
counter-trend at work in today’s employment marketplace, as thousands of
smaller, privately held companies take a different approach to their human
capital. Faced with the same slow growth or diminished profits as the
giant corporations, small business owners are also forced to tighten their
belts. But instead of playing the layoff game, they’re learning to live
with aging capital equipment or last year’s software in order to hang on
to the employees they’ve spent so dearly to recruit and train. By
investing in the future, small businesses are not only helping stem the
tide of unemployment, they’re collectively easing the severity of the
recession.
While it’s hard to work up
much sympathy for a multi-billion dollar company eager to sacrifice 5,000
employees at the alter of corporate profits, trimming the fat from an
organization isn’t as easy as it might appear.
Take the case of Ford Motor
Company, which tried to implement an objective three-tiered rating system,
designed to thin the ranks of consistently under-performing managers.
Since no legitimate end is served by rewarding mediocrity, a merit plan
would seem both logical and fair—unless you happen to be the individual
viewed as a liability. Blasted by a blizzard of age discrimination
lawsuits, Ford was forced to trash its own rating system—and with it,
any hope of reforming a workplace that insures equal outcomes instead of
high levels of performance.
With so many regulations
restricting what large employers can do with respect to their employees,
it’s a wonder anyone is ever laid off. And yet whenever the economy
sneezes, it’s the big corporations that are first in line to perform
major surgery.
Experts who predicted an end
to the “binge-and-purge” hiring mentality following the last recession
were proven wrong, as recent layoffs have perpetuated a seemingly endless
hiring and firing cycle. The good news is that when the economy heats up
again, so will the frenzy to hire more people—which only proves that the
employment “paradigm shift” of the mid-1990s appears to be stuck in
neutral.
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