Layoff Target Cartoon — When KPIs Create Impossible Logic

The Scenario: In this layoff target cartoon, we enter the surreal world of "Metric Myopia."

An anxious HR head explains to the CEO that in order to reach their mandatory layoff target, they have run out of unique employees to terminate.

The cartoon captures the peak of corporate absurdity: a situation where the pressure to "hit the number" leads to a suggestion as ridiculous as firing the same person twice to fulfill a spreadsheet requirement.

The Observation: This piece highlights the dangerous gap between leadership’s mathematical goals and operational reality.

When layoff targets are treated like sales quotas, common sense is the first casualty.

At Kaapi with Ravi, we observe that this "efficiency" often results in organizational paralysis.

By focusing on the percentage rather than the people, companies end up chasing a ghost in the machine—proving that you can’t manage what you don’t understand, even if you have a great chart to show for it.

Layoff targets: The only corporate metric where success is measured by how much of the company you've managed to destroy.

Explore more from Kaapi with Ravi

• Series: Layoff Cartoons 

  
  

• Theme: HR Cartoons