I was particularly disturbed that many of our best employees were worried about their jobs. A hired gun comes into a company and just eliminates whole divisions, firing the good with the bad—but that wasn’t going to happen here. I insisted that all of our more than five hundred employees be evaluated by their own supervisors at every level. There was no quota for how many employees a given division could hold on to. If the best ones happened to be in an area that was going to have particularly severe cuts, we’d transfer them to a different group, where they’d replace a less-qualified or -motivated co-worker. Sure, this would cost us time and money in order to get the transferee retrained and up to speed, but that was a small price to pay. Dedicated, loyal, unbelievably talented and hardworking employees were the heart of our business, the key to our success. We have always been like a family, and at least when this was over, I wanted the best and the brightest to remain.

Okay, it was a time of financial crisis. Maybe the long-lost, loafing uncle who just showed up recently and moved into a bedroom or the distant cousin who didn’t contribute to the household but showed up at meals was going to have to be asked to leave, but were we going to start throwing members of the immediate family or close relatives into the street? No, the family was all going to pull together and make it as a unit.

Having worked for years as a brochure deliveryman and ad salesman for struggling publications, I am well aware that the lack of spectacular results in a particular business is no indication that the staff in that business is untalented. Some businesses are simply highly profitable or in areas of the economy experiencing high growth at a particular time and others aren’t. It takes no greater talent to run a telecommunications company than to manufacture shoes, for instance. Telecom just happens to be a sexy, profitable, growth-oriented business and shoes aren’t.

Of course, one can argue that the choice one makes about which business to go into is indicative of one’s abilities in general. In some cases this is true, but in most cases (like ours, for instance) it is more happenstance than planning that usually determines where one winds up. In the case of the employees, this was particularly the case. The fact that one person might be in a profitable telecom division while another was in a money-losing group was only because, on the basis of their particular talents and our particular needs, we, the management, assigned them to one group or the other. For us to now penalize the workers for trusting our decision making and doing the best job wherever they were assigned would have been both foolish and wrong.

My priority, as the captain of a ship going through rough seas, was to calm and give confidence to the crew who was going to go through the journey with me. It was important, therefore, that all firing happen at once and not in waves, to avoid having everyone worrying, “What’s next?” It was also important that everyone know exactly what we were doing and why. And what our game plan was for the future. People have often accused me of being too honest. Pathologically honest. I need to be literally kept incommunicado during the legal silent periods before our quarterly earnings are reported because of my tendency toward complete openness.

In this situation, however, honesty was definitely the best policy, and the fact that people knew I’d never lied to them before added credibility to my reassurances. While the personnel staff worked overtime firing and arranging generous severance packages for the roughly 125 workers being let go, Jim and I held two mass meetings for the roughly 400 workers we were planning to keep.