Ken was a senior vice president of one of the nation's leading quality consulting firms. In 4 years, the makeup of the company had expanded from the founder, a secretary, 2 full-time trainers, and 4 part-time trainers to 125 full-time employees. Of these, 15 were full-time account executives, trainers with limited sales and customer service responsibility. About 70% of the company's revenues came from offering training courses on continuous quality improvement to clients. Revenues and profits had grown substantially, but earlv in the fourth year, revenues dropped drastically as managed care cost-cutting pressures were felt throughout the health sector and expected sales to the company's largest client, an HS, failed to materialize. Ken was assigned the task of determining what design changes to make. Losses were projected for this quarter, and the president and chairman of the board the firm's founder had decreed that members of the work force who were not productive had to be lot go. A target number of 25 people had been set. Ken had been placed in charge of a three-person task force and given 1 week to develop a plan, including the names of those to be fired and the timing of these personnel actions. The firings had to be completed within 3 weeks. The company had grown so rapidly that it had not had time to complete job descriptions for any of the jobs in the company. It was common knowledge that a lot of people, including some account executives, were sitting around doing nothing a lot of the day. There had never been any evaluations of employees, other than those of the training staff. At the end of the briefing session in which Ken was assigned this task, the president commented, "Good luck! You are going to need it."

1.     If you were Ken, where would you start? How would you proceed?

2.     How can you rationally make these choices?

3.     What kind of organization design does this company need?