The Iwata Option

Layoffs are becoming an easy go-to for companies doing it tough. Again and again do you see 11%, 22%, 35% of a business getting laid off. When this happens we can unfortunately look at the salaries and bonus of the leadership teams of those same businesses, increasing in the same year.

These businesses love to call their workforces 'families'. I truly hope that the leadership of those business have no family if that is the way they treat their 'work families'.

When Nintendo had it's first operating loss of 30 years, the then CEO Satoru Iwata, halved his own salary rather than laying off the Nintendo workforce. He did this twice, once in 2011 and again in 2014. He also asked for his leadership team to also take temporary pay cuts as well.

This is actually pretty common practice in Japan. For leadership to take pay cuts and forgo bonuses when they didn't get the strategy right. It is only fair that if you make a bet, you honour it, not someone below you.