Color Coding Your Fate

Well, this is certainly one way to do things. Following a merger, staffers at one UK company were notified of their job security with a simple color-coded message… in front of everyone. Yikes. The Telegraph reports:

All 16,000 employees of Everything Everywhere, the mobile phone company created by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, were told last month whether or not their jobs were safe at mass meetings across the country.

Up to 1,200 middle managers and back office staff who could lose their jobs by the end of the Christmas holidays were shown a red light and told they were "at risk". Other staff saw the light go yellow, which meant they must re-apply for their existing job. Some 30pc of these roles face the axe under current proposals.

A blue light indicated their job had been "mapped" into the new business plan and were being kept on. A green light showed the creation of a limited number of new roles.

The presentations were made in public in front of between 30-60 colleagues. Some employees are thought to have had no idea that their jobs were at risk before the humiliating public meeting. One employee said: "Some of the people got up and walked straight out of the room, others sat there crying, others were absolutely dumbstruck."

Everything Everywhere said: "Wherever possible, members of our senior management team explained the proposed changes at face-to-face meetings to ensure teams received the information consistently and had the opportunity to ask questions." The company has entered into a 90-day consultation period.

Austrian Man Gives Up Wealth, Starts Charity for Entrepreneurs

A very unique — and inspiring — story from the Austrian Alps via The Telegraph. One can’t help but think that if more people thought in these terms, the world would be much better off.

Mr Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million.

Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for £613,000. Already gone is his collection of six gliders valued at £350,000, and a luxury Audi A8, worth around £44,000…

Mr Rabeder has also sold the interior furnishings and accessories business – from vases to artificial flowers – that made his fortune.

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

"For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness," he said. "I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years," said Mr Rabeder.

All the money will go into his microcredit charity, which offers small loans to Latin America and builds development aid strategies to self-employed people in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile…

Since selling his belongings, Mr Rabeder said he felt "free, the opposite of heavy".

But he said he did not judge those who chose to keep their wealth. "I do not have the right to give any other person advice. I was just listening to the voice of my heart and soul."

Hat tip to The Huffington Post.