Times Are Tough


termination fired business cartoon

When I had a day job, few things bugged me more than painfully obvious corporate waste.

Instead of hiring a service to come in twice weekly to water the plants, maybe you could have someone at the company do that. Or maybe we didn’t need to fly the whole company down for the weekend to show us a powerpoint. And I’m betting we could’ve done without that awful puppet show at the regional meeting. (I’m not making that up.)

I’m not saying that focusing on your strengths, or fostering unity, or, well, puppets, aren’t important, but when times are tough, maybe scaling back a bit on some of the obvious extras might not be a bad idea.

2 Comments ▼

Mark Anderson Mark Anderson's cartoons appear in publications including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review. His business cartoons are available for licensing at his website, Andertoons.com.

2 Reactions
  1. You get the hypocrisy of the situaion perfectly.

  2. I just wrote an article in my newsletter about tips for saving a small business a few bucks. It’s ironic I just came upon this post because it’s fresh in my mind. I’ll give one example here: shop around for better prices on alarm monitoring. When the original contract expires, you can usually find a monitoring service and save up to 50%. I’m not in that business. Just trying to be helpful.