Wasn’t “The Lateral Jerk” going to be the title of the as-yet unmade sequel to the Steve Martin film?
[(-D] [tup] [bow] Good one !
I believe they’re borrowing from “The Peter Principle,” one of the “laws” being the “lateral arabesque,” wherein an employee gets moved sideways (ie, not promoted) but the new job title sounds like a promotion…
Not quite 40 years ago I learned what “special projects” meant in a job description (especially if found on a résumé), which was “we don’t want to fire the incompetent so we moved him to some place where he can do little damage” or something like that. Saw that principle proven several times since then.
I quite agree with your assessment of the situation but as someone who actually reads the emails I get on management changes I have to wonder why the “special projects” ploy works so often. ‘Staying ahead of bad news’ is a tactic that is similar- you move to a new department or project BEFORE the results of your work become apparent. I see this from the wonderful ‘Organizational Changes’ emails I get about once a month. As someone with 30 years in the highest hourly pay grade I always save these messages as background info for when I run into these losers wanting to tell me my job.
Consultants are the only worse plague. You are told that you can’t have the resources to do your job the proper way and then new management comes in and pays millions to someone without a clue to tell them why what your doing is stupid and inefficient and should be outsourced or have new procedures instituted. Of course with a tenth of what the consultants cost you could have started doing things the right way. Why would they ask you though? Your obviously an idiot. Just look at the stupid way your doing your job!
Wandering off topic, here, but, what the heck?
The feds are good at doing “commercial activities studies.” Supposedly, an activity is supposed to look for ways to reduce the cost of operation whilst preparing specs for a private concern to bid on the activity.
The catch is that the federal activity is expected (nay, required) to somehow manage to find a 20% reduction.
I once asked what would happen if an activity took all the work required of it into consideration during such a study and discovered that they actually had to be bigger instead of smaller. I was told “they’d better not…”