I try to gauge the balance that must be required when the ELT makes the hard decision to let people go. However, given the endless cycles of layoff after layoff, I fear they miss the hard to quantify costs of lost productivity, loss of veteran employees, loss of skilled people to the competition and the loss of reputation that Cisco must suffer by not attracting the best and brightest to power the future. After each major layoff there is the cost of paying people to leave. But there is also the cost of lost momentum as people feel paralyzed waiting for the other shoe to drop, or become demotivated when asked to add the work of their team mates who were dismissed. It takes time to recover your stride and Cisco’s crime is doing the next layoff before anyone can recover. This leads to endless paralysis and a massive demotivation of a formerly talented workforce. If the ELT reads this board, please, look at the intangibles of every time you do a layoff. It costs you more than you think.