If headquarters cuts costs, what's your obligation to "do your part"?

Organizations that shift costs, then complain when the shifted costs don't just go away, are blaming the victim. It doesn't matter: Their rationalization doesn't affect the underlying core issue, which is not enough money.

Dear Bob ...

What do you think of a company where headquarters, in order to cut costs, reduces or eliminates some essential core services? And then when those of us out in the field have to take care of them ourselves and try to build them into the budget, get complaints, namely, "We did our part to cut costs. Now you have to do yours."

Seems to me the company's decision-makers aren't being fair about this. What can I do?

- On the wrong side of downhill

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Dear Downhill ...

Welcome to what most mayors throughout the United States are dealing with right now -- cost-shifting plus blamestorming. Fun, ain't it?

What can you do? In the end, there's only one business answer and one emotional answer. The business answer: Find a way to live within your new budget. The emotional answer: Shrug it off.

Here's what's going on: There isn't enough money. Or if there is enough money (doubtful at the moment, but it's happened this way in flusher times), whoever figures out what will impress Wall Street figures there still isn't enough profit, even though there really is.

Regardless, the company's decision-makers have decided costs are too high. Headquarters staff might not have any idea of how the company actually makes its profit, but they have the political advantage of being close to the decision-makers, so they get a better chance to tell their story. They avoid real cost-cutting by instead engaging in cost-shifting, but when you make decisions based on the view from 50,000 feet, you can't tell the difference. And so you approve the HQ plan.

Or maybe the decison-makers can tell the difference. It doesn't matter, because the old canard about humans only using 10 percent of their mental capacity isn't true. The real story is that we use 100 percent: 10 percent to think and 90 percent to rationalize.

It doesn't matter: They've made the decision, which means it's too late to argue. Which leaves you having to pick up the slack, only you're told to do so by spending less rather than more.

The best you can do is to create a spreadsheet along the lines of the one I described in "Should a CIO take a cut to part-time status," (Advice Line, 4/6/2009):