ng fast corrections. Okay, that one does need a little more money. This one underspent. Move that money over there. Worked fine. Everything worked out just right.

Now, here's another one. Here's my second budget story, because if you don't understand how the real world budgets, none of this DOGE criticism is going to make any sense to you.

That same boss once asked me to sit in for him in a meeting where the department heads were arguing to keep their budgets, because there was a higher level above us that was trying to cut our budgets as well. So far I've only been talking about my department that had lots of sub-departments, but above it they were trying to do the same thing. So they brought us all in, and they would each ask each of the managers, you know, is this budget necessary? Is there anything you can cut from your budget? If we cut this, would that be okay?

Now, here's something that's embarrassing. I was very young, but I was fairly capable, so my boss didn't feel bad sending me to do this very important task. And when it came to me, the person leading the meeting said, all right, so you know, looked at the list of projects I guess I had submitted and said, well, what about this one? You really need to do this. Is this essential to the company? And I said, well, if he had to cut something, and I were being a team player, that's probably what I would cut.

How do you think that went over? When I took that back to my boss, every one of you who have corporate experience, you're laughing right now. It's like, how dumb were you? No, I thought I was there to do a good faith effort to reduce the budget for the company, because I thought I was working for the shareholders, right? I mean, it's a fiduciary responsibility to not waste money because you have shareholders. So I thought, yeah, you know, if you're asking me what I would cut if I had to, it would be that one.

And so they cut it. And I took it back to my boss. Oh my God, the look of death that I got. He just cut through me with his eyes. He said, so I hear you gave away my budget. And I said, oh, but you know, they asked me what would be the least priority, and I was trying to do the right thing. And that's when I learned that nobody's trying to do the right thing. Everybody in a big organization is lying because that's how you get ahead. So everybody wanted their own budget not to be cut, but they were certainly happy if other people's budget got cut, because they were competing against other managers. They weren't trying to satisfy stakeholders. That was just dumb on my part.

All right. So the first thing you need to know is if you try to do a scalpel approach, everyone is lying and you won't know it. Well, you'll know they're lying, but you don't know what the lie is or what the truth is. So if you were to say to me on paper and conceptually, is it better to use a scalpel than a chainsaw? I would say the same thing you would say. Well, yeah, scalpel makes sense. That's a reasoned looking at all the details, deciding what to keep and what not. But in the real world, nobody's going to play along with that. They're all going to just look for maintaining their own little domain.

So in my experience, the scalpel approach can only work in specific situations. And I'll give you a few. One would be if you're a small business and you're the owner of the business and it really matters to you if you cut costs, because that money goes right in your pocket. And it's small enough company that you understand all of its parts. So you could actually cut with a scalpel in that case, because you're the boss. It's all good for you if you cut, and you know exactly where to cut and where not to cut. Yes, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel. If you took a chainsaw to your own smallish business, well, that would obviously be a mistake. Obviously.

Now, what is the situation? Or another situation, well, let's put it this way. So that's a situation where you've got time to operate and you're going to be profitable no matter what, but you could be a little more profitable. So if you've got plenty of time, the scalpel will make sense. You know, even if you have to work a little extra hard to find some stuff. Yes, as long as you're in a business that's stable and you're just trying to tweak it every now and then, scalpel.