An investor and board member of one of my early companies used to say:

any day, any time, you can fire a canon through the company’s building and not miss the employees taken out in the blast.” 

I wish I could definitively say that he phrased it that way just to emphasize the point that [...]

All companies, yup that includes the successful ones, eventually have some form of layoff.  Before you go ballistic on me, let’s first define a layoff.  According to Wikipedia, a layoff is:

the termination of employment of an employee or (more commonly) a group of employees for business reasons, such as the decision that certain positions are no [...]

Contrary to how rational and formulaic I may have seemed in my post, When to Get Rid of the “Best” People That Work for You, firing people in a timely fashion has always been the area where I’ve demonstrated my greatest management failures (I’m sure that many who have worked for me might suggest a long list of other actions [...]

My last post on management, When Firing Someone, Focus On Those That Remain, got me thinking about how organizations function and the role of various types of people within organizations.  Inevitably, some people work well within certain organizations and some work poorly.  Perhaps one of the most interesting facts about this dynamic is that an [...]

Firing is hard.  It should be.  First, it only happens because of a failure.  A failure to hire the right person, a failure to train that person well, a failure to create the right motivational or managerial environment for that person or a failure of the person you hire to execute to expectations (note that 3/4 of these failures are [...]