Old lesson, new example

Maybe they had no choice.Then again, maybe they did. Circuit City posted a first-quarter loss. It blamed poor sales in high-ticket items such as large-screen televisions.Wall Street analysts, who rarely see a layoff they don't like, blamed the recent forced departure of 3,400 too-highly-compensated sales staff - the ones with enough skill and experience to sell high-ticket items.I don't pretend to be an expert i

Maybe they had no choice.

Then again, maybe they did. Circuit City posted a first-quarter loss. It blamed poor sales in high-ticket items such as large-screen televisions.

Wall Street analysts, who rarely see a layoff they don't like, blamed the recent forced departure of 3,400 too-highly-compensated sales staff - the ones with enough skill and experience to sell high-ticket items.

I don't pretend to be an expert in running retail stores. I'm terrific at drawing convenient analogies, though, such as the parallel between this and Harold Sackman's research about programmer productivity, reported decades ago in The Mythical Man Month.

Sackman's research showed that the best programmers were more than 15 times more productive than average ones. Since companies don't pay their best programmers 15 times more than their average ones, the economics of this investment should be obvious.

I wonder what the ratio of sales productivity was between Circuit City's best sales people and its average ones?

- Bob

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