To compensate for the sour economy and pullback on consumer spending, many companies are cutting costs like never before. But are they trimming fat or bone?

Since graduating from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School 31 years ago, David Kord Murray has been all over the map career-wise, from selling nuclear weapons to designing web sites to starting a $50 million dollar company and then losing it all, forced to file for personal bankruptcy.

At a three-year product strategy meeting at Apple during the early 1990s, the McKinsey hired guns presented something I now refer to as the “99-idea slide” as the final summary of a strategy presentation. It was chock-full of information, presented in a visually compelling way. It showed all the viable product strategies we could pursue. With its combined richness and graphical simplicity, the 99-idea slide wowed all of us.

It was also useless.