Layoffs cost more than you think - (March 17, 2009)

(Fortune Magazine)—As Warren Buffett likes to say, "It's better to be approximately right than precisely wrong." Every CEO should remember those words when confronting the powerful temptation to lay people off. When you're desperate to save money, calculating the savings from firing staff is easy. But figuring the costs - the real costs - is hard. In fact, you can't do it precisely. So a lot of managers, rather than trying to get the costs approximately right, just assume that they equal the ...