the insiders are making huge profits excercising their stock purchase options and dumping them
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=CSCO+Insider+Transactions
They do that which in turn drives down the price of the stock. So to get the price of the stock back up they reduce costs (layoffs). Next quarter repeat the process. No corporation looks past this quarter’s numbers.
My personal opinion is American businesses started a downward slide about the same time MBA graduates with lots of theories and not much business experience started making business decisions for companies. Everything has been reduced to a number with a mathematical formula for success.