"Right Sizing"

This evening, my daughter told me her fiance's company has told its employees their company will be "right sizing" in the next few weeks. I'd not heard the term before, but apparently it is the new slang for laying people off.

The concept, I imagine, is that "down-sizing" (the old slang) made it sound like a company was shrinking, falling back, retiring from the field of economic battle. In contrast, "right-sizing" gives the impression that a company is getting correct, getting straight, lean, all-muscle, clean.

All well and good for the company which sheds the onus of its failures in a maze of nomeclature. Not so good for the employees who have been shed. After all, if the comapny is now right, then the former employees were wrong.

They are no longer seen as valuable assest the company was unable to retain, but as unhealthy, unnecessary weight that has been dropped during the corporate diet.

The psychological burden of the company's troubles has been shifted to the employees, who are subconsciously made to feel as it that failure was theirs. By casting them off, the company has cleansed itself from the parasites that were sucking its resources dry.

Its bad enough to lose one's job without being made to feel as if you were hurting the company, rather than the other way around. So next time you hear anyone bandying about the catch-phrase "right-sizing" tell them just how wrong that is.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tannin Sensitivity (Sensitivity to Tannins)

Here's the ungarnished truth about tannins and tannin sensitivity. As you probably know, tannins are astringent polymers that naturally occur in coffee, tea, red wine and chocolate (among the most popular dietary sources). Effects of Tannins: Tannins may cause migraines, joint pain that mimics artheritis, tiredness, depression, bowel problems, problems with vision when focussing, digestion problems, thin brittle skin, perhaps hair loss and slow hair growth, and myriad other symptoms, both subtle and severe. For years I suffered a series of symptoms that I had pinned on coffee, uncertain about tea, and pretty sure were tied to red wine - no problem with chocolate. These symptoms were such diverse elements as - lethargy, tiredness, depression, joint pain in hips, shoulders and fingers, thin brittle skin, hair loss, slowed hair growth, slowed metabolism and even acid reflux and heartburn and diminished ability to focus closely, requiring reading glasses. I tried experim
Read more

What is Mental Relativity?

Mental Relativity is a new model of psychology that grew out of the development of the Dramatica Theory of Story. Dramatica's central concept is called the Story Mind. According to the theory, every story has a mind of its own - the structure represents the mind's psychology and the storytelling develops its personality. The Dramatica theory was used to create a computer model of the Story Mind, which was patented and became the core "Story Engine" of a software product, also called Dramatica, which is the best selling story development tool in the world. The Story Engine is actually able to predict a psychological structure for a story based on an author's answers to questions about his or her dramatic intent. It wasn't long before it was discovered that this same Story Mind model was also able to predict the psychologies of real people in addition to characters. In further exploring this unexpected outgrowth of the theory, we discovered that the model was
Read more

The War Between Creativity and Structure

Image
Perhaps the greatest hurdle in writing is the attempt to bring structure to a story without putting your Muse in a straight jacket. Often structure is brought into the picture too soon, clamping your passion into an iron maiden that pierces it more deeply with every turn of a structural screw until it bleeds out entirely. In contrast, writing with purposeless abandon creates a jellyfish of a story: an amorphous blob of subject matter with no spine, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The  Master Storyteller Method  was designed to bring passion and structure together seamlessly, at the right place and the right time in the story development process. When first starting to write, our ideas usually come fast and furious. Many of them are little snippets: a notion for a line of dialog, a location in which some action will take place, the basic concept for a character, or perhaps a plot twist. Sometimes, we begin with no more than a period of history or a topic or an et
Read more