2006 Soap Box Archives

The Boss 04/14/06

I have been blessed with being able to keep twenty or so people steadily and gainfully employed for over thirty years. We have a 401k plan and health insurance for our employees. God has truly blessed me with employees that I not only like, but love and consider members of my extended family.

I have not accomplished this by myself, far from it. I have had the help of some of the most dedicated and hard working people I know of. They take incredible care of my business and incredible care of me.

The jobs that many of my people do are way beyond my field of expertise and comprehension and it is my method just to stay out of the way and let them do their thing. If they need my advice or input they’ll let me know, otherwise atonomy is by far the best policy.

You find capable people you trust and enjoy being around, turn certain responsibilities over to them and let them do it their way while I devote my time and energy to doing the things that I’m best at.

My attitude is that they can’t do my job and I can’t do theirs, thereby there are absolutely no unimportant people in our outfit. Everybody’s individual job is important to the success of the whole.

While I do not and cannot take the responsibility for the success and longevity of The CDB, I do take responsibility for the well being of my employees and whatever direction we take musically and business wise. Because the final decisions on all hairy issues belong to me. They’re my responsibility. Sometimes it’s not easy but it’s called paying the cost to be the boss.

Somebody has got to have the final word, to make the final decision, to say the buck stops here and whatever happens from here on out is my responsibility no matter how it comes out.

It’s a way of doing business that has worked for a long time and while we may not be considered to be a microcosm of how
companies should be run, I think that there are valuable lessons to be learned from it.

Entrenched bureaucracies become top heavy, lazy and inefficient. Look at the recent failings of F.E.M.A. In my admittedly unasked opinion, F.E.M.A. needs to put into the hands of a strong minded person who can compartmentalize it under the command of people he can trust who are willing and capable to get the job done and get rid of all the dead weight it is carrying. If you’re not going to help pull the cart, get out of the way.

Also the government regulations and federal statutes F.E.M.A. operates under should be simplified. You don’t need documents the size of a Sears & Roebuck catalog to tell you when people need help.

And you don’t need Rhodes scholars to administer that help. You need people with practical horse sense who can go among the hurting and see what they need, send the order back up the line and stay with it until the needed help arrives.

Evidently it’s not even clear when state and local responsibility drops off and federal responsibility starts. This desperately needs to be clarified and there should be an on the scene administrator with a checkbook and a crew of able people to decide what’s what.

You can’t sit in an office in Washington and make decisions when you should be out in a rowboat seeing disasters firsthand and talking to the affected people.

In other words, take it to the people. Take it to the streets.

Dealing with bureaucracies is like walking in molasses.
If I had to venture a guess about what happened during the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast I would say that the bureaucracies would bear a lot of the blame.

You just can’t get things done by committee. Somebody’s got to be the boss.

Pray for our troops.

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

 

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