Vice President of Sawdust

One evening, some years ago, I had dinner with a nice couple in Virginia, near Washington DC. At the time I was in the woodworking tool business. The man called me because he was interested in opening a tool store. He had done quite well as an executive, Vice President, for a very large company, one of the giant companies that sells to the government and military. Hence, his posting in Washington. But, after many years, he was looking for a change. He asked if, on my next trip to the area, I would have a meal with him and chat.

In the course of our meal I asked what exactly he did at his company. His brow furrowed as he thought about how to answer this question. Finally he answered:

I am trying to think of the best way to describe my job. The company I work for is really tremendous, with tens of thousands of employees making all sorts of things. I think it would be best to put my job into a woodworking context.

Imagine you have started a furniture making company, just you, working alone. Every day you work hard sawing and planing wood to make things for customers. At the end of the day you sweep up the sawdust and throw it away. It's nothing, just a little pile of dust and takes but a minute. By and by, you hire a couple of people. Then one of them gets the job of sweeping up the sawdust at the end of the day. It still just takes a few minutes. Sawdust is not very important, after all.

Business goes well and you expand. Now a lot of people are working and making lots of sawdust and chips. It's a little too much for one person to clean up at the end of the day, so you hire someone whose job it is to sweep up and throw away sawdust all day long. This is much more efficient for everyone. Still, it's only sawdust and not a big deal to clean up.

Now your business continues to expand you have many factories and they are big factories. You buy big machines to saw and plane the wood and they make lots of sawdust very fast. So you buy more machines to vacuum up the sawdust, to clean the air and to deposit the sawdust in big bins. It amounts to truckloads of sawdust everyday. An army of people still has to sweep up, and maintain the bins for sawdust and load the sawdust and so on. And in a company when you have to deal with a lot of people all dealing with one thing (like sawdust) and that one thing is very big (truckloads upon truckloads of sawdust), then somebody has to be in charge of that area and all those people.

That would be the Vice President of Sawdust. That's pretty close to what I do.

A large enough quantity of almost anything trivial is no longer trivial.


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