During my tenure in middle management, we were expected to reduce our costs for manufacturing our products. Being of an engineering mind, I focused on increasing production by making the job easier to perform and therefore increasing the amount of product produced. Without fail, the expectation from the upper management was not in the increase of amount of product produced, it was always in how many people you can eliminate to reduce salary cost.
In management who was the first to go? Our quality control department. Makes sense (/s). Our customers learned how to manipulate the system by complaining of the quality of our product and instead of inspecting to see if there actually were issues, the remaining service people would just cave in and refund the cost of the product and take back the balance of material.
I knew people who would buy our secondary product which had been returned at bargain basement prices and they would marvel at how good the product they were getting at rock bottom prices.
In maintenance they got rid of our lubrication techs who kept our machines going despite the age of the equipment. Who did they get to replace them? The people running the machines who they also put extra responsibilities on. Our equipment failure rate skyrocketed.
My boss? He only was concerned in which supplier he could get to take him golfing. I saw so many scams where he would lead on a supplier into believing they had a chance to get our business and only would trial their products when he wanted to go golfing.
Our top managements priority? Setting up golden parachutes so that when we eventually failed they were taken care of.
Retired now but watching the situation going on at all of these businesses cutting heads and expecting more of the remaining staff has brought back a lot of memories.
A joke someone posted the other day really hit home. (Not mine – a repost).
A company hires 5 cannibals due to getting rave reviews on their work performance. The only condition was that they would not eat any of the staff. After several weeks of great performance someone notices that one of the janitors are missing. They are called into the office and they swear they weren't responsible. After the boss leaves, the head cannibal asks “O.K. whose responsible?”
One of them sheepishly raises his hand and says he's sorry. The head cannibal says, “I told you to only eat the executives as nobody has noticed that they are missing!”