When You Seea Snake You Kill It

An old Ross Perot story:

quote: "At EDS, when you see a snake you kill it. At General Motors, when you see a snake, first you seek out the best consultants on snakes. Then you appoint a committee on snakes. And then you study snakes for a year or two."

-- from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdewk/is_200305/ai_ziff41660

quote: "At EDS (a firm that Perot founded), when you see a snake you kill it. At General Motors (for which he was a director at the time), when you see a snake, first you seek out the best consultants on snakes. Then you appoint a committee on snakes. And then you study snakes for a year or two."

-- from http://deming.eng.clemson.edu/pub/tqmbbs/tools-techs/dismal.txt

My comment, after a couple of bad experiences:

: "But then you discover that it was someone's pet snake..." -- Jeff Grigg

:-(

(Yes, it was slitering around the production floor, and yes it was biting people, but it was Mr.X's pet snake... And Mr.X was a very important person...)

Actually killing all snakes is just about the dumbest thing you can do with them. In Australia, where we have a lot of genuine man-killing snakes, your safety is greatly increased by keeping a carpet snake in your ceiling. Snakes are cross-species territorial, and a big python in the attic will keep away the night tigers, death adders, and aggressive brown snakes we get in these here hospitable parts.

You may think that WhenYouSeeaSnakeYouKillIt is still good advice re poisonous snakes. But down here we've also learned to prize the red-bellied black snake, which, while deadly, is both non-aggressive to humans and a voracious consumer of the brown snakes. And those browns really are savage bastards.

Crikey!

CategoryConsulting, CategoryStory, CategoryJoke (although not really)