Experience

As we approach the nominating process for cabinet members I am reminded of a personal experience. I was sent to Georgia to manage a poultry processing plant and I got all the supervisors together for a meeting. I told them that I had never seen a live chicken up close and that was OK because I was depending on them to run the plant and my job was to get them the time, training and tools they needed to do their job. In a short time I picked up a lot of information about the business and received good cooperation from everyone. There are many examples of people going into positions of authority without intimate knowledge of the business because the skills needed are more administrative and oriented toward getting people to work with one another for a common purpose. Being new to the business has the additional advantage of seeing things in a new way, the old forest for the trees idea.