Sad to see Shell cutting 5000 jobs, making staff re-apply for 15,000 jobs, and aggressively driving down suppliers’ prices in an effort to cut its debt. This just 4 years after desperate efforts to hire 1,000 experienced oil engineers due to past failures to develop enough of these key staff. I guess Shell’s Annual Report will not be declaring staff to be ‘our most important asset’, but it’s still shocking to see the massive damage firms and even entire industries can inflict on themselves with this kind of mistake – see an extract on long-run staff dynamics from chapter 6 of Strategic Management Dynamics from Amazon UK, US. It’s worth contrasting this approach to staff with the approach of firms like Infosys.