Saturday, October 20, 2007

The Perfect Incentive

At our weekly business meetings, our rodentally hyperactive, over-scheduled VPs frequently lay out plans for business marketing that will never be done. They find this or that sales opportunity and pronounce that our engineers and scientists need to develop proposals to pursue it. Unfortunately, this is the same group that has larded up our workforce with one idiotic process improvement effort after another in a series of acts whose cumulative effect is to rob the workforce of time, investment dollars, energy and morale. Nowhere in these meetings is discussed any means of incentivizing the proposal development process, an effort that will most certainly mean working nights and weekends for the poor sucker who writes the proposal. It's all stick and no carrot. Until now. Announcing the ultimate corporate incentive plan.
Bose acoustic noise cancelling headphones.

Every one of our idiotic process improvement efforts, be it Lean Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, Whole Goals or Competency Aligned Organizations requires seemingly endless hours in mind-numbing training sessions. I suggest that our organization award every person who writes a proposal a set of Bose headphones to wear at these training sessions and allow them to bring their MP3 player as well. While everyone else is jabbing their pens into their thighs, struggling to stay awake, the engineers and scientists who spent their nights and weekends writing proposals will be enjoying their favorite music or perhaps watching a movie on their laptops, blissfully untouched by the staggering idiocy all around them. I'd say it's a win-win proposition, wouldn't you?

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