Burn-out, dismissal and “flex office”: Does the company still make sense?

Last year, Ren Zhengfei, CEO of Huawei, announced that he was getting rid of “mediocre employees”, while Netflix boss Reed Hastings recommends “firing a good employee when you think you can find a great one”. It is not only a question of believing, it is necessary to progress or to leave, according to the method of the “up or out”, in vogue in the consulting firms in strategy. “We still have to understand its logic, that of a company designed as a market society, where employees must constantly be evaluated as market goods to attest to their competitiveness,” writes Thibaud Brière. In the company where he worked, the boss, whom he nicknamed “Founding Father”, imposes on managers a target of 25% of staff to be fired. To sort the profiles, it classifies the frames into three categories: seals, bears and snakes. The latter being those judged to have too high an opinion of themselves… to be released. But if violence is everywhere, it is wrapped in a marshmallow discourse enjoining to make everything positive. Thus, “defects” has become “points of progress”, while we encourage to banish the word “problem”. Because cheating begins with language, according to the philosopher, for whom “a real war of words is at work in the company”.

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