When companies die, they take many forms from mergers to bankruptcies. But there are none more ugly than those who have arrived at this juncture due to a lack of vision and direction. Management grasps and draws on every resource, from redundancies, part time labor and outsourcing to zero footprint office virtualization. But the ugly bit is the rapid undirected reactionary behavior from which a lack of vision and leadership originally brought the company to the situation in the first place.
An inability to addressing the underlying problem continues to demoralize the remaining employees and creates an atmosphere of despair. The company dooms itself from the rot, which is almost never corrected, as the problem is not cured from the bottom up, but from the top down.
If this sounds like AerLingus, it does, I have predicted that it would be gone within 5 years of it’s privatization and it will happen. But this is also a personal issue, as I am getting a first hand view, again, into the collapse of another.