It reminds me of every layoff ever. It's a remarkable feature of layoffs that the people organizing them never have to lay themselves off. Think of the awkward conversations they would have had to have with their family...
"Honey, I did a cost/benefit analysis and found that my role was parasitic value extraction. To maximise the goals of the organisation I have decided to make myself redundant. Further I have decided to give myself 0 days of notice and 0 compensation so that the organisation can use that money to further it's important goals. I'm afraid Christmas is cancelled this year. However, think of the shareholder value I have created."
The mistake OP makes is to assume that the objective of the business is to be a an efficient and productive enterprise.
But that ignores the fact that the business is composed of individuals drawn of the population of human beings who have more prosaic biological needs. From the perspective of management, the enterprise is simply a thing that exists for the purpose of letting them be in charge of it.
This explains several other "paradoxes" such as why wages are low, or why the social security safety net isn't great. Happy, healthy, productive workers, who can speak their minds freely when it comes to problems, even problems created by their superiors, might lead to more efficiency and higher profits. But they also rob management of their social position and the daily experience of being surrounded by people who hold them in very high regard, and treat them with respect and deference. We don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to figure out which of these two alternate universes we're currently residing in.
That is why any political treaty or consensus between management and workers, such as the new-deal or post-war consensus, will eventually be attacked and destroyed by the managers and owners even if it tanks the entire economy with it. The last 40 (and especially the last 10-15) years of US/european history and the destruction of the post-war consensus appears to have borne this theory out.
The point of takeover layoffs is that problem you describe in the first paragraph is nullified.
A well publicised example was the recent takeover of Musk of Twitter. He started by firing everyone at the top first, before moving on to cutting general staff second.
That's usually exactly the way to fix this problem, because BS-ing middle management requires apathetic upper management who're only concerned with milking their positions as long as they can (requiring no-one upset the apple cart). That in turn requires owners who are too dispersed, distant, or incompetent to band together and root out such parasites from the top down.
"Honey, I did a cost/benefit analysis and found that my role was parasitic value extraction. To maximise the goals of the organisation I have decided to make myself redundant. Further I have decided to give myself 0 days of notice and 0 compensation so that the organisation can use that money to further it's important goals. I'm afraid Christmas is cancelled this year. However, think of the shareholder value I have created."
The mistake OP makes is to assume that the objective of the business is to be a an efficient and productive enterprise.
But that ignores the fact that the business is composed of individuals drawn of the population of human beings who have more prosaic biological needs. From the perspective of management, the enterprise is simply a thing that exists for the purpose of letting them be in charge of it.
This explains several other "paradoxes" such as why wages are low, or why the social security safety net isn't great. Happy, healthy, productive workers, who can speak their minds freely when it comes to problems, even problems created by their superiors, might lead to more efficiency and higher profits. But they also rob management of their social position and the daily experience of being surrounded by people who hold them in very high regard, and treat them with respect and deference. We don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to figure out which of these two alternate universes we're currently residing in.
That is why any political treaty or consensus between management and workers, such as the new-deal or post-war consensus, will eventually be attacked and destroyed by the managers and owners even if it tanks the entire economy with it. The last 40 (and especially the last 10-15) years of US/european history and the destruction of the post-war consensus appears to have borne this theory out.