Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

Alan Saracevic, biz writer/columnist for SF Chron, gave props to Sun (SUNW) founder (and soon-to-be-Sun-ex-CEO) Scott McNealy yesterday in anticipation of the official announcement today (McNealy Out As Sun CEO) of the end of the McNealy era at the company he started in 1982.  At least, the McNealy-as-CEO era.  Don't look for him to devote full-time to golf and ice hockey quite yet. The prolonged agony of Sun, beginning with the Dot-Bust and continuing today, has as much to do with the proud, laudable, but ultimately self-defeating insistence of a beleaguered founding-father CEO to avoid the unavoidable: a painful , once-and-for-all reduction-in-force. AKA layoffs, but on a scale considered unacceptable to McNealy.   Firings of people you've known and cared about for years, people who've bled, sweated and wept for the enterprise, is a wrenching experience to put it mildly.  But the choice is as clear as it is stark: you can wield the axe once and be done with it, giving yourself the best chance at recovery, or you can put off the inevitable and prolong the agony for thousands more: undcertainty, anxiety, languishing stock price, lousy numbers, erosion of marketshare and compromise of the brand.  Sound like Sun in recent years?  I was personally involved in a company in the early 1990s that tried to have it both ways -- and failed at both.  The layoffs were strung out over a year, crushing morale and keeping the lid on the stock price.   Each layoff "installment" was excruciating -- and tortuously insufficient.  The brand was sullied by perceptions of equivocal management and mixed signals to customers and partners. For all of his  bravado, and braggadocio vis-a-vis his competitors, McNealy's big heartedness betrayed him.  It didn't have to be this way .  It never does.  But how often it is.