Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 02:50:25 +1100 From: davidn@unique.usn.blaze.net.au (David Nugent) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Humor Break (fwd) Message-ID: <Mutt.19970107025025.davidn@labs.blaze.net.au>
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Sorry, I just couldn't resist. :-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 06 Jan 1997 00:16:25 PST
From: Humor Break Dispatch <morph@voyager.abac.com>
Subject: Humor Break
CHAPTER 12: MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS
_____________________________________
If the employees of your company are incompetent you might want to get some
consultants. A consultant is a person who takes your money and annoys your
employees while tirelessly searching for the best way to extend the
consulting contract.
Consultants will hold a seemingly endless series of meetings to test various
hypotheses and assumptions. These exercises are a vital step toward
tricking managers into revealing the recommendation that is most likely to
generate repeat consulting business.
After the "correct" recommendation is discovered, it must be justified by a
lengthy analysis. The consultants begin working like crazed beavers in a
coffee lake. Reams of paper will disappear. You'll actually be able to
hear the screams of old-growth forests dying as the consultants churn out
page after page of backup charts and assumptions. The analysis will be
cleverly designed to be as confusing as possible, thus discouraging any
second-guessing by sniping staff members who are afraid of appearing dense.
When consultants are added to a department, they change the balance and
chemistry of the group. You need a new process to take advantage of the
consultants' skills. The most efficient process is to use the dullard
employees as data gatherers to feed the massive brains of the consultants.
This keeps the employees busy and makes them feel involved while the
consultants hold meetings with senior managers of the company to complain
about the support they're getting and to pitch new projects.
Consultants use a standard set of decision tools that involve creating
"alternative scenarios" based on different "assumptions." Any pesky
assumptions that don't support the predetermined recommendation are quickly
discounted as being uneconomical- for the consultants.
The remaining assumptions are objectively validated by sending employees off
to obtain information that is not available. Later, the assumptions are
transformed into near-facts through the process of sitting around arguing
about what is "most likely."
Consultants will ultimately recommend that you do whatever you're NOT doing
now. Centralize whatever is decentralized. Flatten whatever is vertical.
Diversify whatever is concentrated and divest everything that is not "core"
to the business. You'll hardly ever find a consultant who recommends that
you keep everything the same and stop wasting money on consultants. And
consultants will rarely deal with the root cause of your company's problems,
since that's probably the person who hired them. Instead, they'll look for
ways to improve the "strategy" and the "process."
Consultants don't need much experience in an industry in order to be experts.
They learn quickly. If your twenty-six-year-old consultant drives past the
Egghead software outlet on the way to an assignment, that would qualify as
experience in the software industry. If Egghead has a sale on modems that
day: hardware experience. This type of experience is unavailable to the
regular staff members who have worked in the industry for twenty years but
still use yellow sticky notes to identify their various excrementory
openings.
Aside from their massive intellects, consultants bring many advantages to
your company that regular employees can't match.
- Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to be
regular employees at your company;
- Consultants eventually leave, which makes them excellent scapegoats for
major management blunders;
- Consultants can schedule time on your boss's calendar because they don't
have your reputation as a whiny little troublemaker who constantly brings up
unsolvable "issues;"
- Consultants are often more attractive than your regular employees. This
is not always true, but if you get a batch of homely ones, you can always
replace them next month;
- Consultants will return your phone calls, because it's all billable time
to them; AND
- Consultants work preposterously long hours, thus making the regular staff
feel like worthless toads for working only sixty hours a week.
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A no-cost moderated email joke mailing list
See the WWW page referenced below for subscription info
morph@voyager.abac.com
http://voyager.abac.com/~morph/jokes/
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-----End of forwarded message-----
Regards,
David Nugent - Unique Computing Pty Ltd - Melbourne, Australia
Voice +61-3-9791-9547 Data/BBS +61-3-9792-3507 3:632/348@fidonet
davidn@freebsd.org davidn@blaze.net.au http://www.blaze.net.au/~davidn/
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