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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: His slash and burn approach to management resulted in few friends. My comments: Put another way, his management style is such that he often treats people harshly and unsympathetically and that made him few friends. In other words, he’s ruthless and they don’t like him very much. At any rate, that’s what we may infer from the phrase “slash and burn”. Originally, “slash and burn” is descriptive of the situation where people clear the woods for farming. Slash refers to the act of cutting down trees and tall bushes. Burn? Yeah, light a fire and burn everything on the land down to ash. This primitive method of farming, though still in use today, is drastic and sometimes destructive. When your mind is made to burn everything down, you see, you’re not particularly attentive to detail. When people burn an area of tropical forests for growing corn for oil used as fuel, for example, they might not mind that there are endangered species left in there. No, the “slash and burn” approach to things doesn’t pay attention to that kind of detail and hence as a result, this approach is sometimes criticized as being raw, rough and rude. In our example, when a person’s style of managing people is described as “slash and burn”, you bet that when he makes a decision to downsize and lay off people to cut costs, he doesn’t care about how those people feel. He may, for example, decide all people over the age of 55 should be let go, he doesn’t mind that some of those people have worked their whole career in this one company. No, the “slash and burn” executive doesn’t pay attention to tender details like that. Or someone pay point that fact out to him, but he cannot be bothered. When he fixes his eyes on the bottom line, he sees little else, throwing loyalty and ethics straight out the window. | 
