In the pantheon of life experiences, getting fired is probably one of the very worst ones you can ever endure. It’s something you shouldn’t wish on anyone, although I can point to a few first-class assholes I’ve been very happy to see get the boot.

So that’s what hooked me when I saw this story in Advertising Age, a sister publication of Workforce Management, titled “How to Be Fired.” It’s written by Martin Dihl, a creative director based in New Jersey, and he makes a great case that although we’re taught all sorts of different things in life, “no one ever teaches you how to be fired.”

I’ve written about this topic a little this year, most notably when I asked the question “Is there ever a good time to fire someone?” after the New York Mets canned their field manager in the middle of the night right after playing a road game in California.  

The Ad Age article is interesting because it gives you a number of tips on how to cope with being fired or, to put it another way, being the subject of an “involuntary layoff,” as it is sometimes called in politically correct HR speak. I’m talking about tips like “Don’t sweat it until it happens” and “Freak out. Grieve. Scream. Yell. Throw things. Cry. Drink. Whatever. But get it out of your system. You absolutely, positively have to deal with it now, otherwise you’ll carry it around with you for the next 30 years.”

There is some good coping advice here, but for the most part, Dihl just deals with how the person being fired should deal with the issue, not how the manager doing the dirty deed should handle it. For that, you should look at how not to do it and see the example set by Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis when he dumped his head football coach earlier this fall.

But you know what really got me thinking when I saw the story? It’s the notion that so many people are getting fired, bought out, laid off and outsourced right now that articles like “How to Be Fired” are viewed as mainstream business commentary, and not just a niche topic for an unfortunate few.

In other words, we need stuff like this because large numbers of people losing their jobs has become all too common. And that’s a sad point to ponder as we head into the holiday season.

It’s that time of year again. We are right at the beginning of the season where every PR person in America (or so it seems) will be touting dubious workforce and HR “experts” to give us advice about the perils of the traditional holiday party.

Last year, for example, I got some wonderfully festive suggestions about “preventive measures” that companies should take to make sure they don’t get sued as a result of something that takes place at the annual holiday party. My favorite was the wonderful suggestion to “circulate anti-harassment policies before the party to remind employees that it covers the party, including prohibiting offensive touching and joking (e.g., sexual, racial, ethnic, etc.).”

Well this year, I have a better suggestion, and it comes from an unlikely source: media giant Viacom, the company that owns such well-known brands as Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon. According to the Viacom memo posted on the gossip Web site Gawker, “Viacom just sent an internal email to employees telling them that the holiday party is canceled—but everyone gets two extra days of vacation instead! To ‘relax and recharge for the coming year.’ ”

The days off come with a couple of strings attached, it should be noted. First, the two days must “be used between December 22 and January 1,” according to the memo from Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and CFO Tom Dooley, but in my experience, most people are more than happy to take off time during that period anyway. And as Gawker rightly points out, Viacom is under huge financial pressure and layoffs are likely coming as chairman of the board and majority owner Sumner Redstone struggles with how to deal with $1.6 billion of debt. It may be that the time off is just a bone thrown to a lot of people who are going to lose their jobs anyway.

But, days off in lieu of an office party is a terrific trend I can certainly get behind. It’s probably something most HR people would embrace as well. After all, who wouldn’t rather ditch the dumb party for a couple of paid days off, chilling far from the office?

In fact, is there anyone anywhere in America who would rather have a holiday party rather than an extra day or two off? If so, I’d love to hear about it, either with a comment at the end of this blog or as an e-mail to me at jhollon@workforce.com. Or, if you have any other suggestions to holiday party alternatives, I would like to know about those as well.

Given the state of the economy, this may be the year that the annual office holiday party gets zapped, once and for all. Is there anyone who will be sorry to see it go?

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

As much as we write about workforce trends here at Workforce Management, it’s hard sometimes to get a good feel for how they are affecting real people who are trying to cope with finding and keeping real jobs.

That’s why this story in Florida’s Palm Beach Post is so instructive, and at the same time, so frightening. “These are not happy times in the marketplace,” the story notes, “as anybody who bothers to get out of bed in the morning to float a résumé on Monster can tell you.”

The story gives you some sense of what this all means in one county, in one state, in a previously booming part of the country:

“[Florida’s] unemployment rate hovers at a 13-year high of 6.5 percent,” the Post reports. “The country is coping with cataclysmic financial news, the state is down 99,100 jobs over the same period a year ago, and Palm Beach County’s three job banks are filled to bursting with job seekers.”

 Yolanda Mendez, a 57-year-old grandmother and National Guard veteran who broke her nose in a bomb explosion in Iraq and now helps people find work at the Workforce Alliance career center in West Palm Beach, tells the Post: “People say, ‘Give me anything.’ They don’t say, ‘Well, I’m looking for this type of job or that type or I need to make $20 an hour.’ They say, ‘Anything, anything, anything.’ ”

With the financial turmoil on Wall Street and in Washington threatening to turn an economic downturn into a full-blown recession (or worse yet, potentially a depression), the anxiety is spilling over to job seekers or people who may soon become job seekers. They’re getting increasingly desperate as they reach the point where, in a terrible job market, any job is better than no job.

“I’ve actually had to give a few of them a hug,” says Stephanie Ross, a receptionist at one of the Palm Beach job banks. As the Palm Beach Post story notes, “She tries to keep her cool as she directs jobless customers to the computers and counselors and, once in a while, to the tissue box. ‘Yes, they come crying,’ she says. ‘It’s always been busy, but it’s becoming progressively worse. Yesterday, we saw 195 people in this room alone, and that was a light day. I try to tell them they’re not alone,’ she says—which is decidedly accurate, with more than 600,000 Floridians unemployed.”

My guess is that you will soon be reading many more stories like this one from Palm Beach, and that the clear sense of fear and desperation that is evident in this one will become less noteworthy and more commonplace.

That’s why it is always good to remember that even if you have a good job you need to hope for the best but always prepare for the worst, because as is becoming all too clear in this turbulent economic environment, the worst generally happens when you least expect it.

No matter where you work or what role you might be in, here’s something you never want to hear from the CEO: “We’re bringing in an outside consultant because to get fit as an organization, [we’re] actively looking for ways to make process and structural changes to our business that will allow us to work more efficiently, with more scale.”

So it goes at Yahoo, where Chief Yahoo (yes, that is his real title) Jerry Yang has enlisted the services of Bain & Co. to look at the business and give some advice on what can be done.

Yang clearly needs some new ideas because the old ones, like putting the company through a massive reorganization, haven’t done all that much to prop up a business model that’s struggling to compete against the likes of Google.

As the Good Morning Silicon Valley blog noted, this exercise seems to be the preamble to Yahoo getting rid of more people. It points out the many euphemisms in Yang’s memo, such as “improve and accelerate our performance” and “be more agile in a competitive marketplace,” as tipoffs to Yang’s ultimate goal. It’s also worth noting that when Bain was invited in for a similar benchmarking project at Intel, the consultancy quickly became know as the “TaliBain” for the headcount whacking that ensued.

In fact, Yahoo watchers and Silicon Valley blogs are having loads of fun with this, especially Yang’s notion that the company “needs to get fit as an organization.” One went so far as to hilariously parody Yang as a Richard Simmons wannabe, and put Yang’s “getting fit” pronouncement in the “Grand List of Asinine Corporate Layoff Euphemisms.”

Here’s my problem with all of this: Why does a major company like Yahoo need to bring in consultants to help it do what it already knows it needs to do? As I’ve noted previously, I’d hire a top-notch consultant in an instant to give me some practical, focused business advice. But to just confirm what I already know? What’s the point?

Maybe Bain & Co. consultants will bring something other than a layoff plan to the table, but it’s more likely that they’ll merely reinforce a management decision that’s already been signed and sealed—and just needs to finally be delivered.

“Yahoo really needs to downsize its staff,” said Jeff Lindsay, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., quoted on Good Morning Silicon Valley. “At some point, they’re going to be forced to have to take a few thousand staff out.”

If layoffs are that obvious to people on the outside of Yahoo, why can’t Jerry Yang and team just buck up, get some backbone and do the tough stuff that comes with a management role? I’ve written about that before, and my guess is it’s because Yang is spending far too much time agonizing over a decision that he knows he needs to make, but that he doesn’t have the huevos to actually pull off.

Maybe that’s really why Yang has the title Chief Yahoo after all.