Maybe its time for another plague to weed out the population.

The independent alligator factory work hard to make flawless alligators, Wal-mart always receives the shipment on time, and the factory generates more profit per year for the owner. The managers here also receive their bonus, but they don’t give any alligators away. If they did give alligators away it would eat at their bonus, because their bonuses are set up on profit performance not how many alligators left the factory.

The problem with the first factory is that no one there cares if the business succeeds or not. They just want their bonus check, and with the resume they have they could easily find work elsewhere after the factory shut down.

To remedy that all they would need to do is change the bonus structure, yet that might mean not making bonuses when the wrong decision is made. The first factory lacks pride and accountability, though.

As for making stuffed alligators, sometimes the company funding the stuffed alligator production finds itself lacking funds (despite spending a lot on buying a factory that produces Emo dolls with flashing lights) and has to reduce its costs. Firing stuffed alligator makers to cut costs doesn’t mean the stuffed alligators were wrongly made, just that they were the least important thing to management right now.

If you want to compare that to your mortgage, if you want to read through those huge and complex documents carefully, there is always the possibility that a bank can foreclose the mortgage for some pretty minor things. If times are good, they’d prefer not to do so if they believe the money is coming. If times are bad, they’ll take your house without a backwards glance.

Read “King Leopold’s Ghost”. Not only was this an important book written about one of the most overlooked holocaustic regimes in human history, but you’ll find yourself nodding with recognized disgust at the parrallels between Leopold’s spin machine and many of the corporate machinations of today.

You’ve never seen such a mastery of spin as this. The entire time Leopold’s companies were working and hacking the natives of the Belgian Congo to death, he was collecting awards from worldwide organizations on his charitible works and philantropic efforts toward saving those very same Africans.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Devil-White-City-Madness-Changed/dp/0375725601/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9372385-2737656?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194516697&sr=8-1

“You have been hearing all of your life about this moment – your first big step into what you have been called and told is the real world. What, you may be asking yourself this morning, is this real life all about? Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 2005 at Dartmouth, it’s not college – it’s not high school. Real life is junior high. The world you’re about to enter is filled with adolescent pettiness, pubescent rivalries, the insecurities of 13-year-olds and the false bravado of 14-year-olds.”
– tom brokaw’s commencement address at dartmouth in 05.

who gets to sit at the cool kids table is more important than who keeps the green stuff coming reliably. although we’d all like to think we are different, when given a choice between someone who is exceedingly diligent and competent and someone that’d be fun to go drinking with, we rarely will entrust our personal or business matters to the diligent one.

Goe, momentarily down to one job again.

Have you noticed how the management teams tend to studiously avoid hiring anyone who knows about or enjoys stuffed animals? What does that say? “People who like our products cannot be trusted” or perhaps “We think our customers are idiots.”

Hmmm.

Again. Well-said.