I always want to give credit where credit is due, so I would be remiss if I didn’t credit CBS late-night talk show host David Letterman as the inspiration for my latest Business of Management blog feature—Stupid Management Tricks.

Although Letterman may have stupid human and pet tricks on his show, they’re generally lighthearted and a good laugh for everyone. Stupid Management Tricks, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. They’re the result of brain-dead management practices that are shortsighted and regressive, and of course, are only laughable in the sense that no one in their right mind could possibly think they would work.

So, here’s the first of what I promise will be many tales of Stupid Management Tricks: slashing staff to improve company performance.

Yahoo, a company that seems to be redefining the notion of brain-dead management, has been gearing up for big staff cutbacks for quite some time. In fact, the company even brought in consultants Bain & Co. to help “improve and accelerate our performance,” according to CEO Jerry Yang.

This is code, of course, for slashing staff, and Bain & Co. has a reputation for being particularly effective at this. In fact, the consultancy earned the nicknamed the “TaliBain” for the work they did in this regard at Intel, and I speculated here that Yahoo brought in Bain & Co. because Yahoo executives didn’t have the cojones to buck up and do what they knew needed to be done—i.e., get rid of a chunk of people.

And that’s why today’s Wall Street Journal story on Yahoo getting ready to do some significant cost cutting “to try to reverse its fortunes from the inside” isn’t particularly surprising. What is surprising is the notion that big staff cutbacks (rumored to be at least 1,000 out of a workforce of 14,300) will actually help the company “accelerate our performance,” as Yang previously put it.

Marianne Wolk, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group who was quoted by the Journal, said that a 10 to 15 percent budget cutback would be sensible for Yahoo given the current economic climate.

 “But she added that such moves would do little to address the company’s bigger problems such as an exodus of employees and a broader ‘graphical advertising business that appears to be in freefall,’ ” the Journal story said.

In other words, Yahoo’s problems aren’t really about staffing, but rather, about key employees the company wanted to keep, but who are bailing out because the basic business model is melting down.

So what’s the Stupid Management Trick here? It’s the one that they caution you about on the first day of business school: thinking you can cut your way to success.

Budget and staff cuts CAN work, but only for a limited time and for a specific purpose. Cuts can certainly get a business over a short-term hump, but too many organizations do it as a matter of course and fall back on it whenever they get in a bind. Circuit City tried to go down this road by getting rid if its most experienced and highest-paid floor workers, and all that did was speed up the pace of the company’s demise, which in turn led to the board firing the CEO who pushed that plan and now may end up putting the electronics retailer in bankruptcy court.

Slashing staff (or reorganizing, as some executives like to call it) is one of those Stupid Management Tricks you’re always told to avoid, but all too many managers embrace as the answer to their problems. It’s not, of course. It’s simply rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking ship. That’s what makes it so stupid. And mark my words: In the end, all the cutbacks and layoffs in the world won’t help Yahoo in the slightest