Management Case Studies

Management Case Study No.1

The manager of a large corporation got a heart attack, and the Doctor told him to go for several weeks to a farm to relax. The guy went to a farm, and after a couple of days he was very bored, so he asked the farmer to give him some job to do. The farmer told him to clean the shit of the cows. The farmer thought that to somebody coming from the city, working the whole life sitting in an office, it will take over a week to finish the job, but to his surprise the manager finished the job in less than one day.

The next day the farmer gave to the manager a more difficult job: to cut the heads of 500 chickens. The farmer was sure that the manager will not be able to do the job, but at the end of the day the job was done. The next morning, as most of the jobs in the farm were done, the farmer asked the manager to divide a bag of potatoes in two boxes: one box with small potatoes, and one box with big potatoes.

At the end of the day the farmer saw that the manager was sitting in front of the potatoes bag, but the two boxes were empty. The farmer asked the manager: "How is that you did such difficult jobs during the first days, and now you cannot do this simple job?"

The manager answered: "Listen, all my life I'm cutting heads and dealing with shit, but now you ask me to make decisions!"

Management Case Study No.2

A man goes into a pet shop to buy a parrot. The shop owner points to three identical looking parrots on a perch and says, "the parrot on the left costs 500 dollars". "Why does the parrot cost so much," asks the man. The shop owner says, "well, the parrot knows how to use a computer".

The man then asks about the next parrot to be told that this one costs = 1,000 dollars because it can do everything the other parrot can do plus it knows how to use the UNIX operating system. Naturally, the increasingly startled man asks about the third Parrot to be told that it costs 2,000 dollars.

Needless to say this begs the question, "What can it do?" To which the shop owner replies, "to be honest I have never seen it do a thing, but the other two call him boss!"