Fire

Let's take aside whether the strategy is correct for the time being and focus on the tactical consideration: How to fire people in a company?

Well, if the target number is small (for example, 100 amongst the total of over 20000 employees of HSBC Hong Kong), the best way is to do it secretly.

I mean, there's no need to make any public announcement.

After all, people come and go in a big corporation.

Obviously, that's not possible if you want to do away with 3000 workers, i.e. over 10% of the entire company.

In that case, the best approach is the Blitzkrieg tactic: Announce which 3000 you are going to lay off and send them away; reassure the remaining staff that you are not going to cut further in the coming two or three years, increase their salary a bit, explain to them that the company is in a tough time but you appreciate their foreseeable effort to work harder in order to compensate for the people who are leaving.

The rationale is simple: This is the only way to preserve the morale of your remaining staff.

(The analogy is also straight forward: Human body tolerates a big wound best if it is a quick and clean cut - such as a surgical incision.)

In contrast, if you tell everyone that you are going to dismiss an undetermined 3000 people in the coming three years, everyone in the company would develop paranoid idea and none would focus on their work.

In addition, the more capable ones in the company (i.e. those who you do not want to fire) would soon leave for better opportunities - because they are well planned ahead and don't want to compete with the others in the job market. As a result, you would meet the quota of cutting by eliminating better people.

Alas, it seems not appropriate to call him stupid - it would be an insult to all the other stupid people.

PS. My advice is not an novel original one - it is taught in many business course. For those who are familiar with the Three Kingdoms Period, Guan Yu (關羽) died for the same reason: He left Mi Fang (麋芳) and Shi Ren (士仁) to defend his military base, the Jing Province, but announced that he would charge them for incompetence when he returned from his campaign at the north.

Mi and Shi would be plainly stupid if they did not surrendered to Guan's adversary.