Brian Robinson (CONTRACT) wrote:

> A very good point. I had a friend who graduated from the Wharton 
> School of Bidness a few years ago. He was of the mindset that it was 
> best to pay the bottom 2% of workers to stay at home because they 
> bring more inefficiency into the system than production. Anyone who 
> has ever owned a business probably agrees with this concept. 
> Essentially 100% employment is less productive than 98% employment.

I once worked for a man that was a grad of Wharton. His third-generation 
family business ran into the ground, he had a stroke or two, and then 
semi-retired to Boca Raton. For me his business was a training ground 
for what not to do.

The problem with the 2% idea is figuring out how to identify the 
non-productive 2% complicated by the additional problem of trying to 
figure out what to do about the non-productive 2% once you have figured 
out who they are, and not finding yourself in an even more 
non-productive law suit as a result of your actually saying how you 
identify the non-productive 2%. Our current business plan is to have no 
employees on the theory that if it is going to get screwed up we might 
as well be the ones ourselves to screw it up as no matter what else 
happens we get to fix it. I have certainly had plenty of employees, and 
employers, in my life to be able to say that I don't miss not having them.

Difficult to say where 2% begins but I do know that you can have one 
employee who does something really stupid in a window of minutes of time 
that they should have had the sense to avoid and gets themselves or 
others hurt as a result and leads to extremely debilitating 
non-productive law suits that go on for a decade or more and slowly 
erode an otherwise healthy business into dirt.

On that theory about the buttefly in Peru having an affect on Wall 
Street... consider it may only take a few minutes of brain spasm of an 
idiot in power to destroy the habitable earth. Choose your idiot wisely, 
vote.

][<en

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