RETAIN Series 7: Exhaust the Ladder Before the Exit: Pay Cuts and Dignified Exits
In brief: Careful readers of the past articles and posts on RETAIN might have noticed that this is the third article dedicated to E. The series has run longer than I had first planned but, to be frank, the ladder deserves all the space. The last article covered the first three rungs: freeze hiring, reduce contractors and vendors, and furlough or cut hours. This one is about the last three: tiered pay cuts, voluntary exits, and layoffs, which come last. A quick reminder of what the ladder is. It is a disclosed, ordered sequence of cost levers. A company works through them one rung at a time, from the least harmful to the most. The order is published in advance, so anyone can check that it was followed. Rung 4: Tiered pay cuts Rung 3 already touched the pay through reduced hours. Rung 4 involves a direct pay cut. The…
RETAIN Series 6: Exhaust the Ladder Before the Exit: The First Three Rungs
In brief: In the LinkedIn post that goes with this article, I described a scene that many managers know. A role remains unfilled. A contractor’s renewal stalls. Someone says “budget” and the room goes quiet. Nobody announces a freeze or calls it the first rung of anything. The ladder is a disclosed, ordered sequence of cost levers. A company works through them one rung at a time, from the least harmful to the most. Layoffs come last. The order is published in advance, so anyone can check that it was followed. The last article covered the ground the ladder stands on: a hiring gate that sets a very high bar for approving new headcount, in good times as well as bad. The reason is simple. Every role added in a boom is a role that may have to be cut in a bust. With that covered, I will now proceed…
RETAIN Series 5: Exhaust the Ladder Before the Exit: The Foundation Comes First
In brief: Exhaust the Ladder Before the Exit: The Foundation Comes First I ended Post 4 with a question about reviews built around a decision already made. This article goes back to the weeks before that, when the decision exists but nobody has made it public. What should a company try before it asks anyone to leave? The answer is a ladder of cost levers, applied in a set order, with layoffs at the very end. A ladder is only as sound as the ground it stands on. This is the first of three articles on E, and it is dedicated to covering that ground. The rungs follow in the next two articles. The cheapest layoff is the one you never need Some of the biggest recent tech layoffs followed growth bets that didn’t pay off. In Nov’22, Mark Zuckerberg wrote that he had expected the pandemic surge in online…
RETAIN Series 4: Reward the Bar, Not the Curve
In brief: Reward the Bar, Not the Curve: The Quota That Keeps Getting Renamed In the LinkedIn post that goes with this article, I asked whether an employee can actually name a bar they can clear and trust, or whether the real bar is a quota – a fixed percentage cut no matter how the year went. A short post can only point at the evidence behind that question. I expand the topic in this article: where the curve came from, how it keeps resurfacing under a new name even after a company says it’s gone, and what a handful of companies did when they replaced it with something people could actually trust. Where the curve came from General Electric made forced ranking famous in the 1980s under Jack Welch: every year, rank the top 20%, call the middle 70% average, and cut the bottom 10%, regardless of how the…
RETAIN Series 3: Introducing RETAIN
In brief: Introducing RETAIN I’ve lost count of how many calls I’ve had with people whose account I trust, sitting anywhere from fifty to five thousand miles away, hearing that their work was rated “exceeds expectations” one quarter and that their role no longer existed the next. The gap between those two moments usually ran a quarter or more, long enough that they stopped feeling like part of the same conversation. The question I kept hearing, in different words, was always the same one: if the bar wasn’t the problem, what was? Post 2 in this series laid out the numbers: cutting headcount doesn’t deliver the financial win it’s sold as. This post is where I answer the question that those numbers leave unaddressed. If not layoffs first, then what? RETAIN, in full RETAIN is six pillars, and one condition running through all of them: a company names a bar…
RETAIN Series 2: The Business Case for Not Cutting Heads – What the Numbers Actually Say
In brief: The Business Case for Not Cutting Heads: What the Numbers Actually Say Every layoff announcement comes with a similar line: “we had no choice.” If you look at the numbers, the story is different, at least in tech. Let’s start with an example that’s the hardest to dismiss. Nvidia hasn’t made a meaningful layoff since 2008. It didn’t touch the headcount during the 2022-2023 wave that hit Meta (8,000 cut) and Microsoft (4,800 cut). It grew instead, while sitting at the centre of the most competitive, fastest-moving segment in the industry. I know the objection: Nvidia’s rise to a roughly $5.3 trillion valuation by April 2026 (Forbes) is about chip demand, not restraint on layoffs. That’s a fair statement. The AI boom drove the stock, not a no-layoff policy. But that objection actually strengthens the point I want to make. If competitive pressure forced companies to cut, Nvidia…
RETAIN Series 1: The Broken Deal
With this article I’m kicking off a series dedicated to a topic I’ve deeply cared about for a long time: my firm belief that companies having their people’s back and companies delivering strong results aren’t two different things pulling in opposite directions – that they are, in fact, two sides of the same equation. I’ve watched markets go through boom and bust, seen corporations handle hard times in wildly different ways, and observed legendary tech companies built by brilliant people lose their magic within a few years of letting their talented people walk out the door. That interest feels sharper now, when mass layoffs have become a knee-jerk reaction to any sign of trouble – a cure-all for problems they were never built to solve. The Broken Deal I want to be precise about the claim before anyone dismisses it. I’m not saying “no layoffs, ever.” My claim is more…