Here is a parable for you…remember Chainsaw Al. See if this sounds familiar. And if I recall correctly, didn’t Mike Z. take a few lessons at some points in his career???

What distinguishes Dunlap from his colleagues is that he takes pride in his toughness, expressing only cursory regret for having cashiered thousands of his workers. When Newsweek ran a cover story about corporate layoffs, Dunlap contributed a gleeful column about how wonderful such firings are for stockholders. Then he savaged AT&T CEO Robert Allen publicly for not sacking enough people. He posed as Rambo on the cover of USA Today. And he titled his 1996 best seller Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great. (In it, he likens himself to Michael Jordan and Bruce Springsteen, fellow “superstars.”)

It’s easy to hate Dunlap for the wrong reason, which is that he is a brutal, heartless, arrogant bastard. According to Business Week, Dunlap skipped the funerals of both his parents, failed to support (or even pay attention to) the child from his first marriage, and refused to help pay for his niece’s cancer treatments. But to criticize Dunlap for his cruelty is akin to scolding a lion for killing an antelope. Dunlap lacks conscience? Well, so does the market. If Wall Street were a CEO, it would skip its parents’ funerals, too. And there is logic to Dunlap’s cruelty. Struggling companies do need to shed workers in order to recover. Dumping 35 percent of your employees, as Dunlap did at Scott, may save the jobs of the other 65 percent. Stockholder profits should not necessarily be squandered on the CEO’s favorite charity.

But there is a right reason to hate Dunlap, which is this: He’s not as good as he looks. Dunlap does not know how to build a company. If capitalism is “creative destruction,” Dunlapism is simply destruction. He prettifies struggling companies for Wall Street, but undermines them in the long term. Both Barron’s and Business Week have chronicled how Dunlap has built his “turnarounds” on cosmetic measures designed to pump up stock prices. At Sunbeam and Scott, he has sold assets to raise quick cash, cut prices to artificially boost sales, and squeezed suppliers for short-term savings at the price of long-term reliability. His R&D cuts have come at a time when other American companies are investing in new technology. He uses PR brilliantly: Hill and Knowlton tout him relentlessly to reporters and investors, winning him an adulatory profile that serves him well. The day he was hired, for example, Sunbeam stock jumped 59 percent on his reputation alone. Dunlap’s companies, too, rely heavily on short-term marketing campaigns and advertising. What he does not do is spend time developing new products, nurturing talent, and cultivating customers. Why? Because he never sticks around a company long enough for that to matter.

Good Luck.

The giveaway is in the suttleness of your assumption that “employees continue to be unhappy”

That’s not comparable to the feedback I am hearing or experiencing for that matter!

There you go again. I replied to your comments regarding John Roese’s blog where you defended him and you are doing it again here. The reason for a blog is to get real and honest feedback from the respondents and not to defend anyone. As best that I can tell people are pretty disappointed; they have devoted years of service and the last thing they want to hear is the company being dismissive of their loyal service. If you were a real Psychiatrist you would understand that denying people’s feelings is not good therapy. Now, go back to your peon marcom job and stop policing this blog; the real police is already here.