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Showing posts from May, 2015

Strange Inheritances

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Late last night I found myself channel surfing in my hotel room. Between infomercials, old Waltonā€™s reruns and the cooking channel, I stumbled upon a new program called ā€œ Strange Inheritance .ā€ The premise of the show is something like this: Great Uncle Ralph dies and leaves his favorite niece a roadside Alligator Farm in rural Florida. The recipient of this wondrous bit of good fortune suddenly finds themselves in a predicament. Pardon the pun, but itā€™s the old ā€œknee deep in alligator thingā€ except the person struggling didnā€™t create the mess. Instead they inherited it. Distributors often find themselves in a similar situation. Examples are many. The last guy hired some doofus to work in the south territory and now you are left with a mess. The computer is loaded with 20 years of bad data and sales metrics wonā€™t work until all the garbage is scrubbed and corrected. Or, territories were laid out inefficiently with salespeople crisscrossing the state in a haphazard mann...