I guess my point to CEOs and managers alike is this – don’t fire people in front of 1,000 colleagues for no real reason. To put it mildly, it doesn’t help moral

I guess my point to CEOs and managers alike is this – don’t fire people in front of 1,000 colleagues for no real reason. To put it mildly, it doesn’t help morale. There's an assumption here that Armstrong wanted to boost morale, because that's what a good person would do, or because that's what other effective managers do. And really, one very simple explanation for what would otherwise be a howling blunder like this is that it was damn well intentional; that it was exactly intended to provoke stress and anxiety. That destroying morale was explicitly the point. Is that so unthinkable? Fear and domination are popular management strategies when times are tough, and times have been tough in the journalism business - as the author takes some time to point out - for quite a while.