Letting People Go
by Bill Murphy Jr.
In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, one of the first things he did was to lay off of about 4,100 workers—roughly 31 percent of the company. A contemporary account called it part of “a last-ditch effort to save the troubled computer maker.”
(Ironic isn’t it, that his last name was “Jobs;” he created a lot of jobs, but he also fired a heck of a lot of people.)
Jobs had sat for a lengthy video interview a little less than two years before this, in which (almost unprompted) he described in detail why he thought that letting employees go was a key part of his role:
