How not to get?fired?

All businesses exist to maximise profit and minimise investment.

Investments that do not produce a measurable return in the desired time are?first up against the wall for elimination when the revolution comes.

I have a retired ex-military friend who writes to me regularly with comments on my publications — generally, we have differing opinions on management and behavioural issues, but today we were in total agreement.

He wrote that he agreed with me on scrapping ineffective Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) interventions. This interested me, as I do believe in DEI as a process to drive bottom-line productivity, specifically by reducing the resistance of employees to difficult changes which are necessary for business growth and survival.

However all too often, like quality initiatives, the process becomes the objective rather than a means to the end of increased productivity and profitability.

Thus we see governments and companies eliminating ineffective DEI functions in their initial retrenchment decisions.

In the 5 books of his trilogy, Douglas Adams referred to “The Hitchhikers Guide”, as a kind of Wikipedia that predated the Internet, which has a humorous entry about the planet Golgafrincham.

Golgafrincham’s poets were fond of making up stories about how the planet was going to end. Maybe it would be as a result of it crashing into the sun, or the moon crashing into it, or 12' piranha bees. A tale that it was about to be eaten by a mutant star-goat got its residents to organize three arks: Ark A of leaders and scientists;?Ark B of useless people like hairdressers, middlemen, and telephone sanitizers; and Ark C of the little people who made stuff and got stuff done. Ark B took off first, sent toward a distant insignificant planet, which turned out to be our prehistoric Earth. The wise folk in Arks A and C stayed put after they got rid of the useless people. Tragically, those Golgafrinchans who remained all died out from an infectious disease contracted from “unexpectedly dirty” telephones.

Businesses decide on retrenchment when problems caused by whatever mutant star-goat, they choose to blame, make action inevitable. The decision on the functions and employees who will go, and who will stay, is clinical. Functions that don’t add enough value are placed on “Ark B” and dispatched.

It’s ironic that this decision is usually flawed, because the perceived uselessness of a function, does not always imply that it is unnecessary — perhaps they were just focused on process, and not value added.

You should ensure that you avoid being placed on “Ark B”, by being indispensable due to the value you add.

After the aforementioned “mutant star-goat” excuse is used — it is of course too late, to start marketing that you are indispensable.

You will be dispatched to a distant planet outside your current business orbit — but remember this is your choice, adding value is what you were originally hired for, so start now.