Why Layoffs Are Like “Open Heart Surgery” (And Other Hard Truths from a Global CHRO)

We often talk about talent in generic terms: “We need to hire the best.” We often talk about layoffs in financial terms: “We need to cut costs.”

But what if we are looking at both completely wrong?

In this week’s special “Jam Session” episode of Proc & Roll, hosts Natasha Gurevich and Zachary Bachir welcomed their inaugural CHRO guest, Lucien Alziari. With a resume that includes leadership roles at Prudential, Maersk, Avon, and PepsiCo, Lucien brought a masterclass in organizational discipline that bridges the gap between HR and Procurement.

Here are four critical lessons from the episode that every leader needs to hear:

1. Stop Chasing “World-Class” Talent Everywhere

It is a common trap: A manager has an opening and immediately demands a “world-class” candidate.

Lucien argues this is a mistake. “World-class” talent is expensive, hard to find, and hard to keep. Instead of chasing perfection in every role, you must be forensic about your strategy.

“Talent is defined by the strategy of your company,” Lucien explains. You only need world-class talent in the specific areas where your company needs to beat the competition to win. For everything else? “Good” is often exactly what you need.

2. The “Open Heart Surgery” Analogy

Layoffs are painful, but why do some companies seem to do them over and over again?

Lucien compares a major restructuring to open-heart surgery. It’s a life-saving intervention, often necessitated by years of “organizational obesity”—letting costs and complexity creep in like bad health habits .

But here is the catch: “It’s a lifestyle, not a diet.”

If you survive the surgery (the layoffs) but go right back to smoking (your old operating model), you have failed. The most common mistake leaders make is removing the people without removing the work, leading to burnout and an inevitable return to the same bloated state .

3. The End of “He-Man” Leadership

We’ve all heard the stories of tech CEOs who believe in “torturing people into greatness.” Lucien didn’t mince words on this topic, calling out the “He-Man testosterone thing” often seen in modern leadership .

His take? It doesn’t work. “If you don’t care about them, they’re going to stop caring about you.” .

Sustainable high performance comes from trust, not torture. This also applies to the Return-to-Office debates. If you only trust your people when you can physically look over their shoulders, you aren’t building a company that can win in the long term .

4. Coding is Out. Curiosity is In.

Three years ago, the standard advice for any 25-year-old was: “Learn to code.”

Today? Lucien warns that technical skills like coding are exactly what AI is poised to commoditize. The shelf-life of hard skills is shrinking.

Instead, the future belongs to those with “human skills”:

• Learning Agility: Can you adapt faster than the technology changes?
• Curiosity: Do you understand the broader context of your business?
• Reliability: Can people trust you to get things done?
• Are you ready to stop tidying up and start fixing the process?

Watch now or read the transcript below.

Transcript: Proc-N-Roll | Why Layoffs Are Like “Open Heart Surgery” (And Other Hard Truths from a Global CHRO)

Natasha Gurevich: Hello, our dear listeners. Welcome to Proc and Roll… This is our practical guide to everything about procurement. But the most exciting part of our today’s gathering is that we have an exceptional guest. As part of our jam sessions… we have our inaugural CHRO. He is my dear colleague… his name is Lucien Alziari.

Lucien Alziari: Wow, what an introduction and what a pressure to be the first.

Natasha Gurevich: You have a lost risk career and you’ve been an exceptional leader. And the moment I determined that I absolutely would love to have you at Proc and Roll is when you share it with the audience that you and I co-presented to that in your career you have raised 25 CHROs. That is truly, truly commendable.

Lucien Alziari: I’ve been lucky… I grew up at PepsiCo which was really the company where I had my closest working experience with what was a world-class procurement team. And then I went on to become Chief HR Officer at Avon in New York, then Maersk in Copenhagen, and the last eight and half years as Chief HR Officer of Prudential.

Lucien Alziari: One is just wanting to be a really talented business executive myself, not an HR executive, but a business leader. Secondly, helping the HR teams become much more of a mainstream business function… And then thirdly… I just have a passion for developing great leaders.

Natasha Gurevich: Let’s talk about… three themes… One is workforce of the future… second is leadership and trust in the time of change… And third… is the commercials of the layoffs… because sometimes that is the trigger to how it starts.

Natasha Gurevich: How is the definition of talent is changing as automation, AI and different technological advancements are taking over, are we looking at the talent differently?

Lucien Alziari: I think I’d start off with the word talent because to me it’s like the most important thing that a business needs to have. But it’s so often used as a generic… “is it good people or is it bad people?” …Talent is defined by the strategy of your company and the capabilities that you need to win.

Lucien Alziari: Every time you have an opening, leaders say, I need absolutely world-class person. Well, sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. And many times you need people who are good. You don’t need world-class. But in some pieces of your business… you’re probably not going to win without world class talent in those areas. So this is about choices.

Zachary Bachir: What defines world-class in this case? What do you actually look for when you’re trying to seek out world-class individual for a role?

Lucien Alziari: World-class for me means better than the other teams have got, the ones that you’re competing against. …This isn’t about the best person within our organization. If you’ve got that, great. But it’s knowing what the best really is by having exposure to different companies.

Lucien Alziari: Leaders who go off on the power trip because they just got promoted and it’s all about them, they’re typically going to trip up badly at some stage. I think leaders who… realize the ambition is for the company, not for themselves, actually tend to have better careers.

Natasha Gurevich: You have your boss, you have your peers, you have your stakeholders, you have your team. …Who did you first have in mind? Is it in the benefit of your team? Is it in the benefit of your company?

Lucien Alziari: It has to be the enterprise. It has to be what’s going to make the company win. …But I think sometimes when people get too devoted to other people, they actually lose their objectivity and that actually doesn’t help the people and it doesn’t help the organization.

Natasha Gurevich: I’d like to share with you a thought that I have for 2026. I believe that majority of procurement teams, or many other teams, will shrink because the expectations… will be that some manual, repetitive, low value add tasks will be automated because tools are finally ready.

Lucien Alziari: I think if leaders are waiting for it to be done to them, they get what they deserve. …We’re not in the people employment business. We are in the business of meeting customer needs and doing that in a way where it’s sustainable and it’s competitive over time. So I make no apologies. Have as few people as you need in order to succeed and then treat them really, really well.

Zachary Bachir: Very often, I find procurement is maybe not 100% aligned with the business and therefore feels unloved. …How do you get the best alignment?

Lucien Alziari: Take the enterprise view, take the business view, not the procurement view. …Do you listen to the CEO on the earnings call? …At the end, it always comes back to… “I really think you should consider us to do business with us because,” and they’re going to say three things. …Do the procurement folks know what those three things are?

Natasha Gurevich: When I joined McKesson, I said… “Walk me through how we make money. Walk me through where we make a lot of money, where we don’t make any money, but we still distribute.” …And then if you start talking about how procurement strategy will address that, then we get completely, completely different response.

Lucien Alziari: I was thinking of the procurement function at PepsiCo… They had a really good sense of what was the strategy of the company. …The people that understood the cans and the aluminum business, they understood the value chain in that industry from the very first extraction of that material from the earth all the way through to the point of delivery of a can to Pepsi to fill with drinks. And they understood how value got created at every step along the way.

Lucien Alziari: Natasha asked me to be candid, so I’ll be candid. Many external parties live in fear of procurement organizations. They’re anxious and they’re worn out by the process of working with procurement organizations.

Lucien Alziari: Buying a $5 cup of coffee? Sometimes what works for the many hundreds of millions of dollars is an approach that’s just crap down to buying the pens and pencils… That’s where sort of stuff gets out of whack.

Natasha Gurevich: I’ve heard from Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, the phrase of “torturing them into greatness.” …I’ve noticed that people don’t want to be tortured into greatness.

Lucien Alziari: No, because I don’t think they ever wanted to be tortured into greatness. And I think there is, particularly in kind of the new economy… this kind of he-man testosterone thing that’s going on. And it’s not an adult relationship. …It might work short term, but it doesn’t build long term great companies… And if you don’t care about them, they’re going to stop caring about you.

Natasha Gurevich: Let’s talk about… layoffs. What do you see as the main causes for layoffs?

Lucien Alziari: I think they come from two root causes. One is sometimes companies make a major shift in strategy… The less satisfying cause of layoffs is because companies just don’t pay attention along the way and stuff creeps in and costs grow… It’s like somebody who stopped exercising, who’s eating a little bit more every day.

Lucien Alziari: One of the scary statistics in life is… the percentage of people who have open heart surgery who go back to smoking. There are lots of organizations like that. …I said to my CEOs over time… if we’re about to go into open heart surgery, let’s make sure we never have to come back. So it’s a lifestyle, it’s not a diet.

Lucien Alziari: I think what happens very often when you do restructuring is you take the people out, but you don’t take the work out.

Zachary Bachir: Now with AI in the wings, how do companies approach this? …Amazon had some layoffs recently… maybe what they’re trying to do is encourage the people that remained to then replace those people with AI tooling…

Lucien Alziari: If a company is saying… “we are going to embrace technology… And because of that… We’re not going to grow headcount.” …I don’t think it necessarily leads to “we have to reduce headcount”… But we’re not going to continue to add because we can’t afford it.

Natasha Gurevich: If you were to advise a 25 year old today… what kind of skills would you recommend them to obtain?

Lucien Alziari: Three years ago, the answer… was coding. Everybody’s going to understand coding. Three years later, it’s like, why do you need coding? AI is going to do it for you. …My advice to a 25 year old would be a lot of this is going to come down to you and human skills. Curiosity… Reliability… ability to collaborate across the organization. Those human skills, I think are the ones that AI is gonna get to last.

This transcript has been edited for clarity while maintaining all substantive content