Somewhere in New York City, analysts squinted at a company’s quarterly earnings and were not pleased. The numbers might have looked great to most business owners and fantastic to anyone working for wages, but stock analysts see the world differently.

These are not the results we were expecting, they said. We told everyone what this company should turn in for the quarter, and it did not comply. Therefore, the company failed.

Miles and miles from New York, company leaders trembled at the thought of those furrowed brows. Whatever profit we made, they said, it was not enough. It’s time to dish out some consequences.

Some nasty local consequences have been in the air recently. I’m just guessing that they resulted from stock-price concern, and I have no documentation of exactly what happened. But I know a few of the names, and the stories sure are sad.

At about the same time the analysts were experiencing disappointment, a number of people in Central Iowa were getting whipsawed. They lost their jobs after years of worthy service, or they were cut loose a few months after uprooting their families to move here. They were summoned in, received the shocking news and woke up the next morning not knowing where to go or what to do.

I heard about a supervisor who couldn’t stop crying while dishing out the bad news.

I heard that one laid-off employee was so upset he went home and struck his wife.

And – can this be true? – I was told that a supervisor had a heart attack as he contemplated the task of firing some of his people the next morning.

Maybe the stories are exaggerated. But when you lay people off in a town this size, stories make the rounds, and they sure don’t do the company’s image any good. Rumors never get less dramatic as they roll along.

It’s true that corporate leaders are responsible for the company first, not the individual. Get too softhearted, let results slide, and someday you’ll have to lay off twice as many.

But there’s clear-eyed management, and then there’s management by panic. Is it really necessary to derail lives at random to appease the analyst gods?

If you spend all of your time staring at the balance sheets, you think a company is nothing but a profit-making machine. When you look up and glance around, you see that it’s a place where people spend a big chunk of their lives. Then you might wonder whether a company might be even more important as a community than as a place for the chosen few to get rich.

The “keep New York happy” approach is a surgical strike. Most employees at an affected company will keep on doing just fine, and the company will set more earnings records.

But what about those folks who were shoved overboard at the first sign of cloudy weather? Their skills are gone, and the survivors are left to pick up the slack and think, “Next time, it could be me.” It’s a good way to build fear, but not loyalty.

It’s not that the company was running out of money and couldn’t meet the payroll. The problem was an uneasy feeling that the elite weren’t getting rich enough fast enough.

Sometimes you have to be tough to protect the company, but this didn’t sound like one of those times.

Plus, I can’t help but wonder: What if the analysts just did a bad job of estimating?