Tuesday, November 27

Do One Thing Well


Sometimes, I'll hear things and get really confused.

This is one of those things.

Have you heard about these "Document Management" companies? Here's an advertisement:

Do you have documents that need to stay safe? Bring them to Document Managers, and our locked facilities and state of the art security systems will keep your documents absolutely secure!

Or, do you need documents destroyed? Bring them to Document Managers, and where your documents are placed directly into the shredder, which uses a fine cross cut to render your material completely unidentifiable.

Isn't that a little confusing? I'm not a genius, but I'd suggest having two SEPARATE businesses: one for making sure the documents were never destroyed, and another for making sure they were completely destroyed.

I mean, what if you took your documents to the wrong desk? Oops.

All of this to say, I'm committed to keeping our church clear. Come to our church to hear about a God who is great and good; how our disobedience and rebellion has ultimately ruined us; and how this God at great personal cost invites us back.

Want a different message? You'll need to go somewhere else.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't believe there's actually a company that does this. Remarkable. I guess in America people will pay you to just about anything.

Nice connection to the church, too, by the way.

Anonymous said...

Dear Retro Evangelical,

Good message, but a bad example.

The people who own these companies and their customers are not idiots. Businesses are requried to store documents (either phycially or electronically) for a specific number of years to comply with government regulations, as well as to protect themselves against lawsuits. Once they get beyond that time limit, businesses typically destroy them. Document Storage companies are a cost effective way to manage a mountain of paperwork that would otherwise clog their storerooms. I'm not in this business, but I have associates who are. I mean this sincerely, not as a jab, but many church members (including myself) have to wonder whether pastors have any idea what happens in the real/business world.

I otherwise have enjoyed and appreciate your blog posts. Thanks for your ministry.

Patrick

Matthew Westerholm said...

patrick,

As a pastor, I may have no idea what's happening in the "real/buisness world". I am the least qualified person to judge this.

From this admittedly skewed perspective, those two things may not be as interchangeable as your separatrix (or forward slash) makes them appear. And I don't mean that as a jab.

The aspect of the business worthy of ridicule was NOT the necessity of destruction of documents, but rather the ability of one business to do completely contrary operations.

That's what this post was trying to say. Read it again and let me know if it successful.

Anonymous said...

it's like a dog-sitting place that also provides euthanization. I'm not dropping off my dog there.

Anonymous said...

They aren't contrary things. There are business documents that you want to store securely and some that you need help destroying. You need to understand the business drivers for both to understand that.

Once again, I get your overall point, just not the example.

Patrick

Anonymous said...

Careful, Patrick. There's a lot of us who read this blog from the real/business world, and I don't think any of us would say the business world is closer to the "real world" than church world. :)

You and I are practically bickering already, but I don't think any mid-size or larger company in an urban center sends its documents to the same site for storage and/or destruction--too much possibility for crossed signals, and that would make our lawyers and accountants very nervous. My experience may differ from the experience you share with your associates, but the pattern for every Fortune 500 company with which I've worked is to use offsite services for storage and to bring onsite trailers or trucks for document shredding.

I think I understand what you mean to say here, and I take your point about storage and shredding being profit centers both of which potentially could be pursued by the same entity, but I feel like you're more trying to demonstrate your knowledge about business than you're trying to understand Retro's concept.