Silo’s Seattle manager donated his cut of the bananas (10,000) to Woodland Park Zoo, but found that the demand there was limited: the zoo only needed 1,000 of them per week for its elephants, monkeys, gorillas, and hippos, and was unable to feed them uncontrolled amounts of any particular food. The vast majority of the fruits were, in turn, passed along to local food banks.

The employee motivation plan was labeled the "Steak and Beans" incentive program. It focused on motivating store managers to meet their sales and credit quotas each month. However, it was based on negative incentives instead of positive motivation. Managers that did not meet their sales and credit quotas received a visit from a regional manager who would gather all of the store employees together and in front of them slam a pie in the face of the store manager for his failure to meet quotas. Other negative incentives included cutting the underperforming store manager's tie in half, requiring managers to push peanuts with their nose across a table, and making managers run backward around the store...

Stories of the company's focus on outrageously negative motivation seemed exaggerated, but court documents from bankruptcy hearings confirmed the stories. At the time, W.T. Grant's bankruptcy was the second largest in business history...

The negative motivation led to store managers threatening and intimidating their store employees to the point that they were giving credit to almost every customer without any effort to discern if the customer had the means to pay the credit card bill. This negative-based practice spiraled out of control and eventually put the company in debt of over $200 million in unsecured credit.

Acheson’s Rule of the Bureaucracy: A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Berra’s Law: You can observe a lot just by watching.

Dave’s Law of Advice: Those with the best advice offer no advice.

Dow’s Law: In a hierarchical organization, the higher the level, the greater the confusion.

Epstein’s Law: If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we’ve solved it.

Grossman’s Misquote: Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.

Hendrickson’s Law: If a problem causes many meetings, the meetings eventually become more important than the problem.

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Kettering’s Laws: If you want to kill any idea in the world today, get a committee working on it.

Maugham’s Thought: Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

McGovern’s Law: The longer the title, the less important the job.

Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Peter Principle: In every hierarchy, whether it be government or business, each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; every post tends to be filled by an employee incompetent to execute its duties.

Wolf ’s Law (An Optimistic View of a Pessimistic World): It isn’t that things will necessarily go wrong (Murphy’s Law), but rather that they will take so much more time and effort than you think if they are not to go wrong.

Zimmerman’s Law of Complaints: Nobody notices when things go right.

Zusmann’s Rule: A successful symposium depends on the ratio of meeting to eating.