This is from ZeroHedge:
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon gathered his top executives in a closed-door meeting last week in Miami. The details of the meeting were leaked to Financial Times. Apparently, Solomon acknowledged his plan to lay off thousands of employees should've been enacted sooner.
"As the environment was growing more complicated in Q2 of last year, every bone in my body believed we should be much more aggressive in slowing hiring and reducing headcount," Solomon said, according to one person with direct knowledge of what was said at the closed event.
Goldman fired 3,200 employees, or about 6.5% of its headcount last month. Many layoffs were in the investment bank's core trading and banking units. The firings were the largest in its operational history….
Solomon acknowledged at the event that if he were to reduce headcount earlier, such as in early 2022, the number of employees fired would've been less drastic.
Twenty-seven years ago and 100 miles from where I am now sitting, I had the same experience. I wasn’t the CEO who dithered. I was the VP who had tried for about a year to get the CEO to agree to layoffs because our company’s main client had cut its demand for our services. I had explained to the CEO, in vain, how many more employees would have to be fired if he delayed his approval of staff reductions on the off-chance of acquiring business elsewhere.
Nothing doing, until the new business didn’t transpire and firings became inevitable.
I ran the division that provided support services to the company (accounting, contracting, personnel, computer programming and computer operations, security, facility operations, document storage and retrieval). The brunt of the firings fell on my division, so as to minimize the firings of analysts who worked directly with the company’s clients.
The “bloodshed” was massive and demoralizing. And far greater and more demoralizing that it would have been if the CEO had been willing to bite the bullet a year earlier.
Where was he when employees were notified of their dismissal? On vacation.
I disrespected him for many reasons, but his handling of the whole affair was the foremost reason.
The story has a happy ending for me (though, unfortunately not for the employees I had to fire). I quit two years after the blood-letting, having a mounted a subtle campaign to arrange the end of my employment on terms favorable to me. The success of the campaign brought a profitable end to my tense relationship with the CEO.
To this day, I am reluctant to reveal the details of the campaign, but I will say this much: I reeled in a big fish by accurately casting an irresistible lure and then playing the fish into my net. The lure was a threat to the CEO’s job that was calculated to invite retaliation against me. I used the (eventual) retaliation to my advantage, having laid the groundwork for that advantage.
The key to the success of my campaign was patience; more than a year passed between my casting of the lure and the netting of the fish (early retirement with a financial sweetener). I celebrate the occasion of my early retirement every year with a toast to myself and a silent curse for the CEO.
The larger lesson to be drawn from my experience is one that Western “democracies” cannot apply because they cannot play the long game that dictatorships can play. The ever-changing cast of characters in “democratic” governments don’t have enough time in which to play a long game. Nor could they do so, even with time on their side, because they are constantly distracted by this and that “crisis” and by the demands of electioneering.
This brings me back to the human cost of dithering. Had “democratic” leaders faced up to the threat of Communism when the Soviet Union was relatively weak, honestly weighed the human and economic costs of waging an inconclusive “cold war”, and taken the initiative against the USSR, the West and the world would be vastly better off today.