poor performers and unneeded staff, his stock price gets hammered leading to questions from the Board and shareholders. Doing it at this time, when there are for sure poor performers/high priced staff who the company is not getting value from who can be let go with at minimum no hit to the stock and more likely a bump to the stock, the CEO is going to take that deal all day long. Yes, there are consequences for those that are let go, but they ended up likely having a good job that they probably didn't deserve (yes, I'm painting with a broad brush here) for much longer due to the solid growth market we were in. So they had a good job for a good period of time.

Rather than CEO speak, the CEO should be honest about what is going on and specifically say, we have had losses to revenue. While we still have strong revenue, now is the time to prepare for potential additional losses of revenue in (specific) areas while still keeping the company strong and focusing on those areas where we know we have growth opportunities. Therefore, we will be doing layoffs for employees who are not as productive, as well as in areas where we are not going to have as much focus in and/or shifting staff to these areas of growth we will be focused on. This will make the company stronger overall.

I have a good friend who I spoke to this morning after hearing the news, whose sister and sister's husband both work for Google doing sales in the Asia Pacific region. US staff were let go today with Asia Pacific coming in another month. This friend's sister had two colleagues on their team out of the US that were let go...one who was a poor performer and one that had been with Google for 3 years and had bounced around to 5 different teams in that 3 years. This friend's sister has been with Google for 15 years, the last 10 in her current department. She is not concerned with her job with Google.