A private company I worked for was a very successful SMB with a handful of partners who ran the place. They generated approximately $15m net profit/year which they shared amongst themselves in dividends and had set targets for the new financial year aiming for 10% growth.
It is 2008 so we are just starting to feel the impacts of the GFC. Three months into the new financial year, we had missed our profit target 3 months in a row and the CEO was livid. To him, this was unacceptable and action was required. At the next management meeting he advised he had expected profit as forecasted and we had failed in topline sales so we needed to make up the difference in the bottom line by reducing costs by the amount we missed (10%) – We all needed to identify 10% of our staff to sack and cut costs.
My initial (internal) response was Are You F'ing Serious! This millionaire megolomaniac will only be able take a profit dividend of approximately $3m. Oh No, wont somebody think of his children!!! He will miss out on the anticipated 10% growth he wanted and his response is to put real people, hard workers, in the unemployment line so his bank account could grow 0.1% more. F'k that guy.
Each manager came back with their 10% however, I managed five smaller units within the company, each with less than 5 employees. So I basically said each employee is critical to the operation of each division and explained, employee by employee, why I couldn't sack them – he accepted my explanation and moved on to the other managers who gladly put names up for the chopping block and they were summarily “executed” from their responsibilities.
It was at this moment I realised that we really dont see eye-to-eye on staffing and employee retention. The people here are really this dispensible to the CEO whose wealth might only grow to $30m this year. I mentally checked out after that and then eventually resigned 12-18 months later. In that last 12 months, I had many, many long lunches at nice local restaurants using my company credit card inviting staff that I saved from the chopping block because … “f'k them”.
tl;dr CEO refused to accept reduced profit so started axing the workforce to the value of the missed profit