Brian Prentice

With Microsoft’s announcement of their financial results and the impending reduction of 5000 employees – their first major layoff – I find myself thinking back on one of the more profound experiences I had in my professional life.

It was the late 80′s. I was a young man who had been working at Apple for nearly three years. Like so many young people I see in Silicon Valley today this was more than a job to me – it was a commitment, a lifestyle. As we used to say back then, when you cut me I bled six colors.

But things were not so rosy at Apple back then. As a result the company felt it necessary to undergo it’s first substantial RIF (or in non-euphemistic terms, a mass sacking). For anyone who’s gone through the process I don’t need to describe the tension floating through the halls of every campus building as you and your colleagues pretend to keep busy while hoping that your manager doesn’t stop by your cubicle and utter those fateful words, “can I see you in my office for a few minutes.”

Fortunately for me I dodged the bullet.

Later that day I was convening outside with some of my similarly lucky friends from work. We were discussing, as you do, who we knew that lost their job and the departments and projects which got hit the hardest.

Then we noticed him. In the parking lot was a man, hunched over the open trunk of his car, maneuvering a cardboard box full of the mementos and personal effects he’d accumulated over the years he must have been at Apple. I couldn’t see his face. But it wasn’t necessary. His body language did the talking. The slumped shoulders, the lethargic movement, the glances back up to the office building. You could feel the sadness, the embarrassment. You could sense his shame.

He closed the trunk and as he rounded the car to the driver-side door I saw it. There, on the back of his car, was a custom California license plate spelling out A-P-P-L-E-1.

Here was a guy even prouder than I was to be working for Apple – a company whose mission we believed was to change the world. Those plates, once meant as a public proclamation of his pride and personal affiliation with the company and its cause, had now become a public testament to his fall from grace. They were salt being rubbed into his wounds of his dismissal.

I vowed then never to put myself in a position were I would have to face the emotional devastation that man must have gone through. From that point forward I drew a clear line between the professional responsibilities and commitments I owed my employer and the way I defined myself as a professional. It was a huge lesson I learnt from the first mass redundancy I experienced.

You could argue that this was something everyone eventually learns as they mature. But I think there’s something more to this. American business in general,  and the IT industry in particular – is prone to a certain evangelical bent that most other cultures around the world consider crazy. The extent that this has evolved in many organizations was explored in a booked titled: Corporate Cults: The Insidious Lure Of The All Consuming Organization by Dave Arnott. In it he makes the following observation:

“My family is a throwback to the agrarian age of only 150 years ago when families found emotional closeness through working together. Industrialization separated the work-family relationship…In the Information Age, these social relationships are moving again, this time to the workplace, where employees are forming corporate cults.”

Far from praising this trend he astutely points out:

“That’s good for the organization but bad for the individual. It’s bad because it takes away the individual’s identity. Spending time and effort in the pursuit of organizational goals reduces the time and effort available to spend in pursuit of individual goals.”

The first mass layoff for an organization has a the same impact on the psyche of an organization as a first heartbreak has on the dew-eyed optimism of young love. Ultimately it breaks the magic spell that fosters cult-like loyalty. People start realizing that they are essentially expendable resources in the operation of a business, and not participants in some glorious experiment. Attitudes harden. Pragmatism reigns.

While this can be a particularly painful process for the people involved it is ultimately good for the individual. I’m not so sure I can say the same thing for the organization. When the corporate culture starts redefining itself around the more pragmatic realities of a business environment its a lot harder to get employees to log those long hours, to work over their holidays, and to attend all those team building events that cut into their personal lives.

Microsoft, through good management, has avoid this for over three decades. But things will be different now.

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