Opinion | Massive layoffs in technology? Just another day in the Corporate Blender.

Now, no business thrives by standing still, and there is no improvement without change. Course corrections, reorganization and strategic pivots are all necessary from time to time. Technological changes continue to require the restructuring of major industries. But over the past quarter century, the idea of ​​disruption has also metastasized into a kind of cult, whose creed is that everything must be constantly disrupted, and that if you don’t change everything, you’re losing.

You can take disruption courses at the business schools of Stanford, Cornell, Columbia and Harvard. On the cover of a leading business magazine, you can read how to “Build a Leadership Team for Transformation: Your Organization’s Future Depends on It.” And if you are looking for the catechism of chaos, you can buy the inspirational posters and chant the slogans: Fail fast; disturb or be disturbed; move fast and break things. Some of this, of course, is a product of the hubris of Silicon Valley technologists. But there is also a belief that a leader’s fundamental job is to bring about change. It’s hard to remember a time when there were different ideas about how to run a business.

Moreover, because a majority of business leaders—along with the consultants and bankers who advise them, the activist investors who exhort them, and the financial analysts who evaluate their efforts—have been raised on this credo of change, the ongoing churn becomes something of a crisis. of flywheel. A leader brings about change because that’s what a leader does. The advisors and investors and analysts respond positively because they have learned that change is always good. There is a rapid rise in reputation, stock price, or both. The executives – paid, remember, usually in stock – feel like they’ve been appropriately rewarded for maximizing shareholder value, and then everyone moves on to the next change.

But it is hardly clear whether this has the desired result. Research on mergers and acquisitions activities has shown that the rate at which they destroy – rather than increase – shareholder value falls somewhere in between 60 And 90 per cent; Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford Business School, has argued that layoffs rarely result in lower costs, higher productivity or a solution to the underlying problems in a company; and few of us who have experienced reorganizations remember them as the opportunity for a sudden flowering of productivity and creativity.

Seen through the eyes of those on the front lines, the reason for this gap between intention and results is coming into sharper focus. When the people around you are ‘transferred’, or when you suddenly find yourself working for a new boss who is not yet convinced of your competence, it is quite a challenge to convince yourself that all this change and disruption is not an improvement at all. .