Resizing The Organization 19. This book seeks to provide executives with useful insights, tools, guidelines, principles, and lessons learned about organizational transition and change. | Resizing and the Marketplace 161 Changes such as M As and restructurings downsizings and strategic alliances are often responses to outside pressures to increase the size or the short-term profitability of a company quickly. Acquiring company executives see M As as a quick way to increase the size of their empires please the stock market and improve their standing with their boards of directors. Acquired company executives see M As as a way to generate the resources they need quickly to expand or provide protection from a hostile takeover. Managers on both sides see an M A as a route to expressing their personal ambitions and press executives to make an acquisition Bastien Hostager Miles 1996 Haspeslagh Jemison 1991 . Finally outside advisers financiers accountants attorneys and so forth also press for acquisitions to take place since these parties profit from their advice being taken Mirvis Marks 1992 . Of course growth is not the reason for downsizing or restructuring. Rather the goal typically is to maintain revenue size while dramatically cutting costs. Executives see the downsizing as a way to please shareholders Cascio 1998 Cascio et al. 1997 . Retained managers see the change as a way to eliminate their personal rivals while they show how lean and mean they can manage. Accountants are able to generate many billable hours advising executives on where to make cuts Downs 1996 . There are four common problems with this decision-making process. First the process generally happens so quickly that the managerial implications of the proposed changes are rarely thought through Mirvis Marks 1992 Zuboff 1989 . The process of actually making organizational changes is much more complex and difficult than the process of deciding on what changes to make. in fact many times the decisions may not even be implementable Jemison 1986 Jemison sitkin 1986 . Second there usually are interpersonal conflicts left hidden in order to get the basic decision made. For instance Zuboff .
