When McKinsey & Company did it, it was evident that other big consulting companies will follow, and cut workers: “An Irish-American professional services company based in Dublin, which specializes in information technology services and consulting, Accenture, has revealed plans to trim its workforce by laying off 19,000 workers”. The new normal since Q4 2022 is that when companies trim workers, Wall Street rejoices. Accenture’s stock is up more than 7% since this announcement. Of course, without this redesign, there will not be a LinkedIn.
Accenture is laying off 19,000 employees worldwide — about 2.5% of its workforce — and consolidating office space as it seeks to shrink costs amid rising economic uncertainty. The Irish-American consulting giant said the layoffs will mostly affect employees in in back-office or non-client facing roles; it expects to spend $1.2 billion on severance over the next 18 months. A slowdown in client spending has hit other consultancies: KPMG recently announced it was cutting 2% of its U.S. workforce and McKinsey is reportedly considering eliminating 2,000 jobs.
Accenture also lowered its revenue growth outlook for the current fiscal year to between 8% to 10%, down from a previous estimate of 8% to 11%.
For decades, the social contract of labour was to get a job in a company, grow on that job, and retire while working for that firm. Then, people spent decades in one company. The phrases “company man”, “company lifer”, and “one-company man” made sense.
Then in early 1980s, the redesign started: companies started killing that social work contract between employer and employee. Legends like Jack Welch of GE made it a management system – fire the bottom performers, promote the best. It went wild and just like that, there was no hiding place. American law evolved, the world followed: no human has any protection from axing managers. Labour was indeed labour, tedious and painful because jobs were offered as “as is”, uncontracted for most workers.
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Before then, employees were loyal. Resumes or CVs were like classified documents: they were totally personal and secretive. But as the employees saw the dismantling of the work order, they revolted. They needed to, because they had lives and families to take care.
LinkedIn, a professional networking site, provided a cover, for these global employees. Simply, across industrial sectors, people felt it was normal to post their resumes publicly, for all to see, including the present employer and potential ones. The secretive resumes were gone. You can see the resumes unconstrained and unbounded on LinkedIn. That was a new world.
A local Nigerian proverb explains it all: “As hunters have learned to shoot without missing, birds will have no choice but learn to fly without perching”. In my local language which I share with peerless Chinua Achebe, he used the Eneke, a bird, to take home the same point, “Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.” We are the Enekes and we are flying on LinkedIn without deleting our accounts. That is the only way to survive in a world of firing managers.
Comment on Feed
Comment 1: It’s interesting to see how the social contract of labor has evolved over the years, and how technology like LinkedIn has provided new opportunities for job seekers to connect with potential employers.
However, the constant need to be “available” and to showcase oneself can inadvertently create a sense of competition and pressure that may not always be healthy or sustainable.
Comment 2: Now we describe our career in terms of roles we’ve played across board and not the ladder we’ve climbed in one organization.
Even athletes score against a club at the beginning of a season, and lift trophies with it by the second half of the season. Maybe we would reserve loyalty for family.
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Do we really need any of these bogus and larger-than-life consulting firms for proper functioning of any economy? For decades we have glorified nonsense, making ordinary things look super extraordinary; the scam needs to end one way or another.
The best talents must be deployed to practical and productive undertakings, we waste finest talents in the altars of administration and ‘management’, then sending average people to do the actual work.
Where we ought to be immersed in production, we are obsessed with ‘services’, only to start shouting inflation and then deploying financial engineering to patch things up.
Break things up, and let more people go into baking of the cake, rather than its sharing. This lopsided economy we have been promoting for few decades now has injured a lot of people, time for a proper redesign.