Management by Santa.

Christmas is coming fast. A runaway locomotive barreling down the Main Street of your life. Ignoring the stop lights, and lane signals, crushing the smoothie stand (erected and staffed by the happy memories of your life) at the intersection of Third and Main. Scattering the pedestrians and civil servants who help maintain the sanctity of your life. A cruel, careless, rampaging bull. Seeking, in its blind rage the total destruction of the happiness you have managed to cultivate and harvest throughout the year. And it is almost here.

Now, in the face of the looming tragedy you have to find the perfect gifts for all the people who have treated you so callously. It falls upon your frail, stooped, tender shoulders to find something that will make all of the ingrates, the ne`er-do-wells, who have spent the last 330 days undermining everything you wanted to accomplish, a nice present. How do you do that?

We, here at Whacko Nation, are here to help. We have scoured respected, scholarly sources for the answer to this pressing question. Finally, we found the solution. It was buried in a university reference source, hidden, secret, safe, until we cracked the code.

It seems that Santa has an apparatus, a method of avoiding giving gifts to certain people. People who don't fit in with Santa's way of thinking, people unwilling to follow "the Santa example. This device, is revealed here, to the public for the first time. It is almost certain we will need to find sanctuary after exposing this revolutionary discovery.

"He's making a list
He's checking it twice
He's going to find out
Who's naughty or nice"

What a stroke of North Pole Genius. Take the people who are hard to shop for, or want expensive crap, and transfer them to your naughty list. Problem solved.

Of course, there is some recent research indicating this is an excellent method of organizational behavior modification (OBMod). Post a "naughty and nice" list in the break room. You will want to start with everybody on the "naughty" list. This forces an adaptive scenario wherein all the associates will scramble to be moved over to the "nice" list. There is even anecdotal evidence of people sabotaging other employees to make themselves look "nice" by comparison.

Clearly, Santa is on the cutting edge of human resource management practices in the new millennium. It explains how he can get so much work out of a small, "undersized" staff. There is a lot we can learn from the Jolly Old Elf.

Tune in tomorrow for "the Tooth Fairy, a study in the economics of supply and demand" here on Whacko Business Television.