Let’s be clear, this isn’t a polemic against layoffs. Businesses must evolve. The issue is not preventing workforce transitions, but preventing thoughtless ones. Just as environmental impact assessments govern physical infrastructure, we need psychological audits for human capital restructuring. Microsoft’s 10,000 layoffs came with an upskilling buffer; TCS’s cuts came with bench-time ultimatums. Rightsizing is not a strategic failure, but treating talent as disposable rather than depreciable is.TCS had a choice: become a case study in reinvention or a cautionary tale of extraction. It chose the latter. But the lesson for every CEO is this: true transformation doesn’t happen through subtraction, but through activation. The companies that will dominate the next decade aren’t those that cut deepest, but those that think most profoundly about the intersection of human psychology and business evolution.
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