Our world would most likely be a different place if we all had 16 fingers and toes rather than 10. But we have 10, and when talking about general numbers values that are easily divisible or multiple by a factor of 10.
This is true for both personal and professional life. If you are going to provide some back of the envelope estimates for management using 10k or 100k going to be more easily understood by the audience than 7.8k or 82.6k. I guess that is what the management consultants were thinking when they prepared their presentation for our management. Their goal was to try and find some significant savings to increase profitability.
If you have ever looked through the numbers, even for a large company you won’t be making those big savings by reducing access to office supplies or by eliminating free coffee. You need to look at those big ticket items like property or labor. The savings can be found either way. You wouldn’t be the first company to sell of your corporate headquarters only to rent it back.
This consultancy decided that it looked like the company could use some slimming down to make its goals. The equation was really quite simple. To be honest, there probably was some dead weight, but the pitch was this.
Think of each “worker” as 100k in salary and benefits.
If you want to save five million, then you simply need to get rid of fifty employees. If you do it by the end of the year then next year you will see the savings.
This particular plan was not generally available as that kind of talk tends to make most employees a bit nervous and the ones who were not nervous tend to think management is lumping us into a pool of identical resources.
The management were happy with this line of thinking and if you are cynical enough you might even think that they were already counting their bonus for increasing profits. Well, not all of them. Thomas in controlling agreed that people were one of the larger costs but it seems a bit unrealistic that every department has two or three people so worthless that workload wouldn’t be affected.
The project group thought about these sage words, but the siren call of possible bonus’s was too strong. Thomas was simply removed from the project group and the downsizing carried on.
Who was right? Some things can never be definitely answered but there was some fallout in one of the affected groups. It turns out that their remuneration was nothing close to the mythical 100k and not only that they were a profit center. The people who were let go were part of repairing and installing equipment for customers. Needless to say, the savings in that department were not as expected.