Big worries

The Great Man announced the day before yesterday that he intended to leave the office in about a month. No one knows exactly what that means, but he did make it clear that someone (that is, me) would have to start taking over the administration of the firm. I had my doubts that the firm was being administered in the first place, and it has been driving me absoutely nuts.

Of course, having these duties put on me leaves me in a very similar situation to the one I left behind in California. There, I had all of the management decisions on my lap, and three other cooks adding their own spices to the broth, which left me with little power to implement my decisions. The advantages of that situation were that 1) it was a firm I had built myself, for better or for worse, so I felt a personal stake in the outcome; 2) as a part owner, I had real power to implement my decisions and only had to seek consensus from my law partners to do so, which was not so onerous a burden most of the time; and 3) however bad our problems got, my partners and I were still going to be friends.

Here in Knoxville, I have none of these advantages. This isn't my firm and aside from my own responsibilities to my clients and my desire for a steady paycheck, I don't feel any ownership or personal stake in what happens to the firm. I have management responsibilities but no real power to implement my decisions other than persuasion. I am friendly but not friends with the Great Man, and our relationship is professional rather than personal. The same is more or less true for everyone there. And some of the results of the laissez-faire attitude about management are unprintable here.

So I get to stop being friends with everyone. That's bothersome to me, but if this firm is to have any chance of turning around from the direction it's been headed, someone needs to take charge. That means making some unpopular decisions because everyone doing just what they want to do is not working for me. The Great Man himself is going to be quite unhappy with what I have planned, because it will necessarily hit him where it hurts, at least in the short run. There's also already great resistance to my efforts to manage certain personnel who shall remain nameless (for now). I'm told to anticipate resistance to changing our filing protocols, much less actually making people do work all day long. I joked with The Wife that I'll have until Monday before The Great Man overrules my decisions.

If I get cut off at the knees, though, I'm laying down all of this responsibility. He's either going to let me do this right or he's not going to let me do it at all. And I'm not going to stop looking for alternative career venues, either. I didn't think management was fun in California; why should it be any better here? If I must get stuck doing this job wherever I go, damnit, I ought to do it somewhere that I'm happy. And I've been thinking that maybe that means going back to California.