The higher up you are, the worse the layoff

I read with some interest a story in the New York Times Sunday edition, about the woes of out-of-work CEOs. I was about to pass it by - after all, who cares about laid off upper echelon when we have so many regular joes in the unemployment line?

But the photo of the fired CEO that the writer was profiling beseeched me: He looked so downtrodden. I read on, and found out that this gentleman in his mid-fifties was newly laid off after giving his heart and soul to build up a corporation.

He drew a healthy six-figures from this company that services the pharmaceutical and bio tech industries, traveled the world for them, was fluent in three languages. He essentially constructed and launched their global quality assurance program, taking the company from a fledgling effort to an international force. It's fair to say he was good at his job.

So good, in fact, they canned him. And that's the reason they gave: now that the company was trading at its current caliber, they didn't need his skills anymore. Sure, they offered him a severance check and an impeccable reference, but where the heck was he supposed to go with it?

Where do all the unemployed CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs go, with their five-page resumes and oft-intimidating pedigrees? You can't just place a senior executive into an entry level job and expect them to succeed. These are baby boomers who've reaped the rewards of a magical, uninterrupted stream of success. In very bad times, they're trying recapture the magic. Quite the quandary.

And in truth, there really is no answer. Just like the regular joes, they're getting stonewalled. National services like New Directions in Boston offer the laid-off execs classes in prospect networking, seminars on business network sites like LinkedIn, and office space for them to make their calls.

But they caution that it will take well over a year to produce any leads. When the severance money runs out, and these unemployed bosses dip into their savings, they are faced with the same issues that plague many American households, like how to pay the mortgage and where to go for health care.

Hopefully, this is not another dreadful sign of the times. It's not refreshing to know that CEOs aren't safe from the axe. In fact, it's disturbing to know that the bursting bubble has reached the top of the ladder. It means things are bad all over.