Sometimes referred to as a death spiral, it is similar to an analogy I remember John Chambers using after the difficult decision to the difficult decision to lay off 8,500 in 2001.  I was fortunate to have survived that round, even with my team going from 24 employees down to 6 overnight.  This was repeated when they laid off 14,000 employees in 2016

Just having read the story from LinkedIn’s CEO about the challenging decision to lay off 6% of their workforce, combined with news that the delinquency rate for May was 8% on mortgages in the US, has lead me to have a flashback to 2001.  The analogy that John Chambers used made a lot of sense at the time.  I still had a job and that certainly influenced my feelings.

John Chambers said to imagine being in a plane that is in a spin.  You have only seconds until you hit the ground.  Do you make multiple small adjustments on the flight stick as you try to correct?  Or do you make one hard pull, one sharp adjustment, to save yourself?

I’m curious to see if LinkedIn’s move will be repeated.  Or if they made the one sharp correction that they needed to.

Note – I recently updated this article. I had been wrong on the year I was there.