Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for August 17, 2010

Should have outsourced the board as well.

They laid off the guy with the whip. But never mind, it appears they’re sinking bow first due to the dead weight they’re carrying forward.

Thus, always, with the top-heavy bureaucracy! Just once I’d like to layoffs begin at the top rather than at the bottom.

The inverted pyramid of failure.

He just needs longer oars; looks like it’s not a job to make you rich, but it’s a job for life.

LOL! Another Brilliant Comic. Thanks Wiley :-)

The management IS sitting in the bow… on the deck over what used to be called the “Forecastle”. So, the boat is down by the head and with a list to port. Figures. All that weight placed that high, and they’re about to turn the boat upside down.

Mr. Miller must be on vacation; this is a repeat of a comic he did in 2006 (you can see the date on this strip still); I still have it on my wall at work. It appeared the day my company announced a reduction in force, the timing was uncanny. He’s done some brilliant corporate strips over the years!

Because you got rid of the people who actually do work, and kept the useless baggage!

Looks more like a US gov’t agency rather than corporate America

@jdhayden

When has a government agency EVER made itself smaller?!

Every CEO in the United States ought to be required to look at this cartoon every morning of the year and, again, at night.

We shoul take all our unemployed and parachute them into Cina, then the products we import could be sold as American Made!

Hey, I worked for that company. After exiting Chapter 11 bankruptcy, they hired about a dozen senior and executive vice-presidents to help “chart their course” while they laid off about 150 people who do the actual work.

Brilliant!

It would have been funny enough with just the board members and the one guy at the oars.

But adding the glass door at the waterline and having the poor guy row backwards - absolute brilliance!

Yeah, I got in trouble once when I worked for a (now gone) business that started “re-engineering”. We were all asked what and how we felt about the new “look”. I told them it was much like trying to lose weight by cutting off a leg, it was working but it sure made it hard to get around.

That’s exactly what my previous employer must be thinking now after they laid me off last year. Once again Wiley, you’ve hit the nail on the head!

But if we laid off the board, WHO WOULD MAKE THE MONEY?

I’m sorry kids, but if anyone tells you a corporation’s purpose is to manufacture things, or to create solutions, they are so deluded it’s a wonder they acknowledge gravity.

A corporation’s sole purpose is to accrue money for its shareholders. If that means selling off the critical assets and driving the company into the ground, so be it, as long as the shareholders can sell off in time.

Baslim: Thanks for the clarification. A second look proves you to be correct. Wiley has lopped off the bow so neatly that I misread the visual context of the cartoon. (Maybe it would have helped if the “patch” would have been a little more makeshift.) But without the bow, and the focs’le where the crew lived, the cartoon makes even more sense. Anyway…I stand corrected.

And pubs say that robber baron’s ceased to exist last century.

More chiefs than indians on board.

That’s what happens when you ditch your main power source and rely on an uninterruptable power supply that you bought for cheap because it fell off a truck.

It seems that corporations aren’t the only ones that suffer from this syndrome: boards of education are often the same. Thanks, Wiley!

To quote a wise man, “No company ever downsized itself to greatness”.

Looks like our hospital….be afraid, be very afraid…

Your too funny, EMET!

A

I was also treated to this nugget in today’s email, in a column (Keep The Joint Running) by Bob Lewis:

Managing by the Numbers: Absentee Owners and the Decline of American Industry. The authors are Meek, Woodworth and Dyer, the book was published in 1988, and the book’s dust jacket includes these words: “Today’s executive is more of a money manager than a leader of people; today’s companies are more concerned with manipulating assets … than with making quality products and creating new American jobs.” And these “This historical shift toward an absentee ownership structure and a highly trained, professional management is usually hailed as progress. In fact … these developments are the real culprit behind the appalling decline in America’s competitive position.”

(http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/?p=3695)

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

The problem is obvious: they let him keep the redundant oar! Once they take away that ‘dead weight’, things are sure to improve!! Or course, then they’ll be wondering why they’re going around in circles…

Good Lord! Maybe Wiley’s not on vacation, but has been downsized/eliminated, like the rest of the crew, and The Corporation thinks we won’t realize they’re running reruns! How diabolical!

THIS will go on my wall!!!!

I find it also funny that, not only is the oarsman rowing backwards, the ship is listing to starboard – suggesting the CEO is a bit heavier than the toadies at the other end of the table…

lol

Nabuquduriuzhur, the scary part is that some of the people who ran the companies into the ground are now running for state and federal offices.

mbdot - I used to row (crewing, sculling) as an amateur and you always face backwards, but your coxswain faces forward in the stern, telling you pace and direction.

Never rowed on a Ben Hur type ship though…

McDonald-Douglas / Boeing redux

Reminds me of how regressive’s front-load their contracts so they can avoid being shortchanged when a business they’re ruining eventually goes under, yet they still survive in spite of the Darwinian motto to the contrary.

This pretty much tells the whole story.

Relevant then, more relevant now. Thanks Wiley and happy vacation.

Well of course you’re not going any faster, you…you executives! You’ve put all the weight at the top, got the only employee working backwards to boot, and put the glass ceiling so far below you that no one with fresh ideas and a clue of what’s really good for the operation has any real chance of claiming power. Enjoy your long, hard fall with all the weight being where it is. I just feel sorry for the sole peon–I mean, company associate–left. He’s got nowhere else to go in this situation unless he does the smart thing and jumps ship. Better to take your risks with real sharks than corporate ones.

@Wildcard24365: Guess who has more stock than anybody else? Yes, it’s the board and the execs and they are motivated to sell off resources until they can unload the stock they have made worthless by their mismanagement.

Your all right. Lets combine our voting share blocks and reverse this. Oh, you don’t have a voting share. You took the family to the islands and your new car took all your disposable income. So you didn’t invest in this company at all? The company that employed you for twenty years you didn’t feel like investing in? How much have you invested in America? Yes, that $2500 suit looks great. You only paid$1800 on the Internet? Vietnam you say? Anyway, get in line behind that guy with no shoes. The dole is about to be given.

Be sure to note the posts and rope at the bottom of the steps barring the one worker from ever communicating with the fatties on the top. Very clever.

FTW !

I love how the boat is listing to the bow and port under the weight of the CEO. And is that a screen door down at the water line?

all they have to do is outsource the job to a dozen asian sweat shop rowers for the same thing they’re paying this poor shmuck

Corporate America at it’s finest!

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Reid and Pelosi will never figure it out…oh…wait…you’re probably thinking this is a corprate board…..

Wiley hit the nail on the head with this one!

@baslim: “where is the rudder?”

Well, since they’re not going anywhere anyway, they sold it off to improve the bottom line…

Could not have said it better. Excellent ‘toon.