Fire the “individual contributors” and make those who you spare work harder. After all, we all know that everyone but the CEO is probably lazy most of the time.

If you fire them all, the overall lazyness level in the company will drop to close to zero.

Also, for a newspaper (or a subscription based software manufacturer) the model of firing every productive staff will actually work quite nicely. The company gets rid of a huge chunk of cost while the customers have a subscription that they can probably not cancel right away. So revenue will not immediately decline.
Well worry about next quarter once it really comes around.

One company I was with has perfected this process by making sure that code they still needed was open sourced before the developers were fired.

pj

You have been in the media business how long? When have you ever seen logic in the way they run the business?

The logic of cutting a staff at a newspaper when taken to an extreme says get rid of the entire staff. The numbers will look great.

This may come as a surprise, but that’s just what any other publicly traded or investor run company does. I call it corporate short-sightedness. When you’re under pressure to deliver quarterly successes, you can’t afford to wait till your product gets better and more people buy it. You have to make do with what you can save on the bottom line and the easiest thing there is to cut down on workforce. You just have to make sure that you cut deeper than your customers so overall, the net effect will be more money in your corporate pockets.

pj

Microsoft is Ford/GM/Chrysler/AMC circa 1977, flailing away as the world around them changes.