Firing Korben Dallas
There’s been a lot of attention paid to a comment that Jes Staley, CEO of Barclays, said on Wednesday 29th April 2020 in comments to reporters.
“…the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.”
The emphasis of that statement is about the infrastructure itself, and the notion of a centralised office.
Yet we were playing through some future scenarios earlier this week for a client project, and started wondering if there’s an underlying, pointy realisation that emerges for this business and others like them in two to three years time.
What if it’s not so much the building they don’t need, but the 7,000 people instead?
And if everyone works from wherever they just happen to be, is it just easier to let people go automatically, discreetly. You can’t storm into the HR office if there is no HR office.
You might get fired like Korben Dallas…