The goal of the CEO of a publicly traded company is to make the shareholders money. As much money as possible. If laying people off is the best way to do that, they'll do it. Blaming the CEO for doing the job they were hired to do seems short-sighted. Blame the broken system that incentivizes this, that makes doing it profitable. And then, let's change the system.
If their job is to make money for the shareholders, and quarterly reports show that they are either making less money, or incurring in losses, then they aren't doing their job. They laid off people who had little to zero influence in defining the company mission, trying to cut spending. This suggests that the C-suite over-spent. > Blaming the CEO for doing the job they were hired to do seems short-sighted. Blame the…
That’s a bad take. Companies can incur losses while the ceos do their jobs. Short term profitability and long term growth are both ceo responsibilities. If you take decisions to boost short term numbers to gut the company’s health over a longer term you should be fired. The exact myopic view led to destruction of airline and car rental companies stock in the last decade. Those ceos were not making money for the shareholders beyond the few quarters they “made money”.