Dan Schneider - a novel way to memorialize a dumb mistake

From Adam Bryant's New York Times Corner Office column. Schneider is CEO of SIB Development and Consulting, a company that helps businesses reduce spending with vendors.

We had an employee who was working on a project for a Fortune 5 company, a major project. He’d been working on it for a month, compiling data, and he didn’t back up his hard drive. So it’s a month’s worth of work, tons of data. We were able to get the hard drive recovered but it cost about $1,500 to have the people recover it. Everybody looked at me like they thought I was just going to fire him or kill him.

And I don’t know where I got the idea, but I just said: “You’ve got to go buy everybody ice cream. We’re having an ice cream party.” Because I realized that if I yell at everybody, they’re just going to figure I’m a jerk. But if we’re all sitting around eating ice cream, everybody knows why we’re eating ice cream — it’s because this guy screwed up. That will set in and they’ll remember it and then just maybe they’ll think, “Oh, yeah. We had ice cream last week. Maybe we should back up our work.” Knock on wood, we haven’t had to recover any more hard drives.