No Wonder HP Was In Such Sorry State When They Were Laying Off So Many Of Us...

We weren't being inspired by a modern dance troupe in the cubicle farm:

Most dance companies make money by selling tickets to their performances. Boise-based troupe Trey McIntyre Project has a more expansive business model: "We've decided that we have a real asset, which is the creative process itself. We're selling that," says John Michael Schert, the company's co-founder and executive director.

Companies are buying the pitch. Corporate giants such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) and Aetna (AET, Fortune 500) have signed on, and The University of Chicago Booth Business School recently hired Schert for advice on getting inspired....

Lumbering tech giant Hewlett-Packard is a company that desperately needs new ideas. Von Hansen, the company's general manager of future technologies, has been working with TMP almost quarterly since 2008. He says working with the dancers "pulls our staff out of the same way we do things so that we can better design solutions and solve problems."

TMP's dancers show up at HP's headquarters -- sometimes unannounced -- and break into a performance right by employee cubicles. Afterward, the dancers lead employees through a discussion of the creative process and how a dance is created and refined.

 Hansen admits that he can't point to any specific problem solved by this.  Duh.

When you can't figure out what you are doing wrong, distract attention with something else.  Like a Dilbert strip, except real people lost real jobs while HP took itself down the rathole.

UPDATE: See this May 8, 2013 Boise Weekly article about how this was complete fabrication by CNN.