AMD And JetBlue: Fire Everyone

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

The lesson to be learned from the recent stock price movements of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and JetBlue (JBLU) is that you cannot fire enough and you also can’t fire high enough up the management chain.

JetBlue pushed out its CEO, probably due to the severe customer service problems the airline had in a snow storm this past February. When the company bounced him from the corner office, its shares rose almost 5% to just under $11.

Over at AMD (AMD) word made it to the street that the troubled chip company would fire 450 people. Oddly, the CEO is not going. AMD’s stock moved up almost 4% to just above $14.

Both JetBlue and AMD have been trading a bit above 52-week lows, and it is difficult to say whether the stock price gains will hold. But, if they do, it may be a lesson in letting people go.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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