In the World of Corporate Business, there’s one Great Evil… personal greed… and redundancy.
…in the World of Corporate Business, there’s two Great Evils… personal greed… and redundancy… and a lack of appreciation… in the World of Corporate Business, there are three, THREE Great Evils… personal greed, redundancy, a lack of appreciation… and sales. (*sigh*)… amoungst the Great Evils in the World of Corporate Business there is personal greed, redundancy, a lack of appreciation and sales.
And, in all my working years, never have I seen these four horsemen of the corporate apocalypse ride in better formation than at my previous employer. Well, when I say employer… more ‘victor in a doomed acquistion.‘
Now, sound mind and a knowledge of how internet search engines work prevents me from naming the company, but logical is the name.
Suffice to say, I’ve gone through the redundancy process previously, and I’ve helped work colleagues faced with redundancy, sitting as their ‘second ear’, as the process allows.
But it’s never been handled as badly, as insensitively, as unfairly as the last occasion this occurred for me. Honestly, they were shockingly poor! Which was odd… given their degree of practice at it…
In the previous year, we had hit some budgeting issues and were being pressured by competitors, so I was greatly in favour of the acquisition, believing (erroneously, it later became manifestly apparent) this would fund a move to the next level of what the business could provide its customers and its employees.
In truth, the small business collapsed.

In desperation, I approached a (as they now like to be called) C-level manager, who shrugged his shoulders and replied, “R***, it’s simply because the numbers aren’t big enough to feature in board-level reporting…”
So, a once prosperous and successful company was allowed to dissolve because its loses weren’t “big enough to feature in board-level reporting…” !!
Now this is the point at which I failed. I failed to realise that there was no future. I failed to see the headlong rush for the revolving door (and they actually have one too !) was a herding instinct I didn’t have. So I stayed in what soon became apparent as the dust off hastily cleared desks settled, was a viper’s pit.
My redundancy, whilst not a surprise, was still… a surprise; more in the atrocious manner in which it was mismanaged. When I left, of the +50 people employed in the business at the time of the acquisition, I think we were down to 6 or 7 of the “originals“… all in 18 months.
Redundancy needs to be a clean break. It is only right to dispense with someone services with solemnity, consideration and respect. Logical Is had none, and they paid off my notice period and showed me the door.
I saw that C-level manager some months after. He’d gone on to become CEO. How the coffee in my hand at the time didn’t go over him remains a mystery to me to this very day. Suffice to say he didn’t stay in Costa for long, and thankfully (for whom I’m not sure) I’ve not seen him since…


