If you think about it, this doesn’t really make sense as a criticism of layoffs. You shouldn’t run a company with less than three months of salaries in the bank? Well okay, in that case if there’s a downturn and you only have four months of salaries in the bank, you need to lay people off to stay above that line. The result is the same, in a big downturn you may need to make layoffs.

The goal of a company is not to minimize the chances of a layoff. If layoffs can increase the company’s chance of survival, they might be a good strategy.