baseball glove : Santa Is A Great Leader

Can you imagine trying to manage a few hundred giddy elves who are shut in year round and spend their off hours drinking spiked hot chocolate and doing who knows what with fairy dust? It would be enough to drive even the best of entrepreneurs to hide out at the North Pole. Somehow Santa manages the task without pulling his whiskers out. I expect he has a management system that promotes from within. The hard working elves get into management. The slackers are stuck cleaning up after the reindeer.

Santa Perfected "Just In Time" Manufacturing

Santa heads up one of the largest, most diverse manufacturing operations in the world. His product lines range from rag dolls to toy trains to rocking horses to baseball gloves for the little kids, to iPods and cellphones and diamond rings for us big kids. Santa's factory runs year round, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and never, ever suffers from cost overrun or production shut downs. Santa perfected the "just in time" method of production that is used by many of the world's largest manufacturers today.


Santa Pioneered Global Product Distribution

Santa is the king of single channel distribution. How else could he deliver millions of presents to good little girls and boys all around the world on a single night? Santa's distribution process is a closely-guarded secret (elves and reindeer are required to sign iron-clad nondisclosure agreements), but I expect it involves a highly detailed logistics plan and the best CRM software on the planet. You never hear about Santa calling up a kid and telling them a present is backordered until July.

Santa's Delivery & Tracking Systems Are Second To None

If you think FedEx is number one at tracking packages think again. Santa's track record is spotless. He has never, ever missed a single delivery or left a box sitting on the porch in the rain. Every package is delivered in perfect shape, right under the tree.

Santa Wrote The Book On Customer Satisfaction

Santa proudly boasts a 100% perfect customer satisfaction rating. You never hear about class action lawsuits and Better Business Bureau complaints against St. NIck. Santa makes sure that his customers are happy and if they aren't, he'll come back next year to make things right. If JD Power could find him, I'm sure they would give Santa their Christmas Customer Satisfaction Award.

Santa Claus Is Watching You

Not everyone believes that Santa is the perfect entrepreneur. There are those kids who complain that Santa never brings what they ask for, but we grown ups know that Santa brings the gift that is deserved, not necessarily the gift that is asked for.

Here's a little Christmas tip from your Uncle Tim, boys and girls, ladies and gents: If you get a lump of coal in your stocking this year it's because you were bad and that's what you deserved.

It was not because Santa dropped the ball.

Merry Christmas everybody!

by Tim Knox