The layoffs and dividend are related -- the company's death rattle has been shaking a while now. Management is desperate to retain the confidence of the investor class.
Speaking as a shareholder here, a 2 trillion dollar valuation warrants extraordinary justification. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. As the AI models get better and better at compressing the world's information, people will be going directly to their model of choice
It makes me ill writing this, but I believe it is due to the big consulting firms recruiting from elite academic institutions. Our primitive brains ascribe incredible value to institutions of any sort. Not that the universities are bad themselves of course, but that there is a belief in the general public that those graduates are smarter or better.
I think the issue there is that these new grads parachute into companies to advise top level executives, while have no real world experience on how business or people actually are in the real world. A lot of things sound great on paper when learning in the classroom, but don’t play out well in real life.
A consultant position should be one a person earns after spending 20 years in the industry, it is not something anyone should start out as.
Most of the big consultancies are also big accounting firms, where there is a fair amount of incentive for sign-offs to mean something, or at least have some serious risk if that sign-off isn't impartial or well researched.
I believe they try to project some of that earned trust to customers for the consulting side of the house. Though there is little, er, "accountability" for sign offs there.
