CEO tenure has been dropping for years. So what they know is that if they want to get paid in a big way, they need to quickly do things that look tough and impr

CEO tenure has been dropping for years. So what they know is that if they want to get paid in a big way, they need to quickly do things that look tough and improve short-term cash flow, which in turn bump the stock price. If they wanted to actually be tough, they could ride it out and take slowdowns as a time to really improve internally. As an example, take Toyota, which rose from the decimation of post-war Japan to the world's largest car company by sticking to a no-layoffs policy and using slack times to invest in people, process, and plant.