The Margin could muster little sympathy for Al Dunlap, a.k.a "Chainsaw Al" or "Rambo in Pinstripes". Al, you see, earned his nicknames by virtue of his capacity to slash jobs - redundancy programmes introduced by him cut thousands of posts in bloated US companies.

On his first day at Lily-Tulip, an ailing paper products company, he called in the senior officers, instructed two of them to stay and told the rest they were fired.

In another firm - Scott Paper - he was told the job of the corporate morale officer was to ensure harmony in the executive suite. "To hell with harmony," he snapped. "Get rid of her." He also reversed a long tradition of encouraging executives to perform community service and cancelled $3 million in pledges to charities. Within two months he had fired 11,200 employees - 35 per cent of the workforce - and paid off the company's $2.5 billion debt. In the process he made himself a darling of Wall Street and pocketed $100 million.

But what goes around comes around and this week the axe fell on Al when he was sacked from struggling consumer electronics company Sunbeam, where he arrived two years ago.

Despite cutting about half of the company's 12,000 jobs, the share price had languished and directors reportedly believed he had lost his commitment to salvage the company.