It's raining Pink Slips!!

While surfing the news over the past couple of months, job-cuts have been catching my eyes.. It's like an unstoppable Big Bang! The only thing is, nothing's expanding... It's all falling apart. Doing an MBA, I sometimes wonder, are all the managers in the world just puppets. Are they all so helpless, that one huge storm (read Sub-prime crisis) can leave huge conglomerates to nothing more than beggars??
I was on such a gr8 vacation at home after my first term at IIM Indore, when my dad handed me the newspaper and showed me the headlines..."Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt". Who wasn't reading about the Sub-prime crisis?? Who didn't know that something like this was right around the corner?? But even then, that news left me shocked to say the least. I mean "LEHMAN BROTHERS" ??!!
I guess that's old news now. In the hindsight, people now just call Lehman Brothers a foolish company. Those same people who couldn't stop praising them as if they were god, have become their worst critics. See how the wheel of time can turn you around?
Coming back to why I started writing this post - The economic downturn has left so many people across the globe without jobs. Sudden pink-slips on your office desks are no more a surprise. Just to give you an idea of the gravity of the situation, I'll quote a few of the figures from recent news articles:

1. Volvo - 6,000 jobs
2. General Motors - 3,600 at least
3. DHL US Express - 9,500 (in addition to reduction of 5,400 positions at the beginning of this year) ; part of their plan to cut operating costs to 770 million from the previous 4.2 billion euros
4. Nokia Siemens Networks - 1,820
5. Morgan Stanley - 19% of its 44,000 staff
6. Goldman Sachs - 3,200 (10%) ; in addition to executives losing their year-end bonuses
7. Sun Microsystems - 6,000 (18%)
8. Ford Motor Co. - 2,600
9. GlaxoSmithKline - 1,000 job-cuts (in addition to doing away with 800 vacancies)
10. Citigroup - 52,000
11. Bank of America - 7,500 and counting
12. American Express - 7,000 (10% of global workforce)
13. RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) - 3,000
14. Virgin Media (owned by Richard Branson) - 2,200 (15%) by 2012
15. British Telecom - 10,000 jobs by March 09'

There are too many figures, but I'm sure you get the picture. Though the scene looks gloomy for the global Indians, number of job-cuts in the domestic Indian Market have been comparitively less stark. Let's see what the future holds for us MBAs...