A short first-person monologue (YouTube video) in which the speaker, Mike Andes, argues that managers must fire poor performers quickly. The speaker emphasizes personal experience—claiming never to have regretted firing anyone—and uses a cancer-removal metaphor to justify cutting out low performers to preserve organizational health. He notes that initial hurt feelings fade and that the organization improves soon after firings.
I never fired one person that I regretted doing it afterwards. Not one single time. We're going to fire poor performers quickly and stop carrying dead weight. It is your job to fire people that are low performers, and it stinks. I hate firing people. As the business has grown, I now have operations people in all the businesses, and they do the firing because I hate firing people. I always held on to people way too long before firing them. But here's what's crazy. I never fired one person that I regretted doing it afterwards. Not one single time. Every single time I or any of my managers have fired someone within about a week or two after initial, you know, there might be hurt feelings or friendships that people had, etc. But after a week or two, it's like, oh, my goodness, that's so much better. And you also hear all the stories of what they were actually doing on the clock. Always amazing how those come out after they were fired. So you gotta fire poor performers quickly. It's like cutting out a cancer. Do I want to cut off my arm because there's a huge tumor that's growing and metastasizing inside my body? No. But I must do that in order to preserve the rest of the body, because then my other arm is gonna affect it and my legs and my chest and my head, and I'm going to eventually die. And so a business that doesn't cut out the cancers in the organization eventually dies, full stop.
