layoffs

call half of your staff into the main conference room, let your HR director explain things in calm perfect resource-speak and then fire her too while someone changes the locks. pay and then fire the locksmith and have them all thrown out into the parking lot and sprayed with a firehose by the security consultants.

pile the unused aeron chairs in an empty conference room until its full of them. empty chairs have sad old memories, sagging marks from sagging people, dead dreams, amusing enough. but these tangled chairs are also actually a form of competition; if something goes wrong and a competitor buys you out they'll never be able to untangle the chairs and suddenly they're paying rent on a room they can't use.

assemble your remaining staff each morning for 8:00 a.m check-ins. pace the room, filing your nails with a machete. reveal nothing.

don't lay off by merit. keep the managers who botched it up for now but pick their lackeys off at random, using percentile dice or the I-Ching. after you've fired half the staff, hire ten new people at higher salaries to break the spirits of the rest. wear a bandolier festooned with human skulls.

when plotting layoffs, don't think people, think strategy. consider office layout, an even gender balance, two by two. if this downturn for some reason features an apocalypse, will your organization be prepared to propagate the species? consider both your situation as chief executive but also that of your chosen successor. castrate or drug other males. police your brood. kill your successor, planting his head on a pike in front of your office to warn pretenders to the throne. think of your employees as potential followers in the dusty haze that will follow the great war. fill the supply room with bottled water, TV dinners, and a trusty cyanide supply, just in case. in case they come for you.

perhaps you've gotten a bit paranoid, alone in your office late at night, drunk in the dead new york quiet. but it's sort of nice, isn't it, how every one else has gone home. now you don't have to draw the shades or lock your office door. unlock the secret vault and review the dog-eared pages of your great plan. if the market continues its descent you can fire them all, and the last man standing will be you: master of the universe.