I read this diary: http://www.dailykos.com/...
...and I liked it. Great diary. Do not take this one as any thing but positive for the author, who brought us some good food for thought.
Be sure and check out the nifty toy at the end of the diary. Thanks.
Do take this as my thoughts, after the orange thingy below...
What got me thinking was the word loss, and I just left a long comment about it. Long enough to warrant a brief diary.
Bottom line is these are not losses, except for Amazon, and even they are just playing games.
I really dislike failure to meet revenue expectations being framed as a loss.
For one thing, who really says those expectations are meaningful? Sometimes they are. Often they are not, or are stretch goals of some sort.
Precisely the sorts of goals that make corporate America more ugly than it normally is. Some bright spots excepted of course.
They made a lot of money. Bucket fulls.
That's just not a loss, though we can say it's an opportunity cost of sorts, and they will say they should have had it, and once the opportunity is gone, it's gone.
But that's not a loss at all!
Say we entered into a venture of sorts and we planned on making $10K, with $2K expenses.
Things go bad, expenses are $3K, and we end up making 9K.
We are happy to be discussing how nice it would have been to make $10K, while living nicely on the $6K we made in profit.
Not making the money expected is a nice problem to have.
So is paying taxes and things like commission, both of which are tied to revenue. The bigger the payments, the bigger the revenue was.
As long as that revenue is real, not contrived by hiding expenses and such, it's a great problem, but we can't tell them that. Typically, corporations are leveraged to the hilt, with only the owner / exec carve outs being liquid, and it's the size of those they bitch about when they don't make what was expected.
And they bitch about it, calling it a loss, because they didn't meet their personal goals and they didn't meet the very high expectations they used to justify compensation in line with those goals either.
Sure, that's a loss to them, but to us? No fucking way.
Not making enough money overall is a loss, but even then we've got to discuss executive / owner compensation / distributions.
Again, they set personal goals, and they mandate compensation, and they justify that by saying they take big risks and expect a big reward. Fair enough, but when the risks fall through, they somehow are insulated from them in all ways meaningful. The only material loss is typically one of personal pride and standing. It's not like they don't live well, or suffer some serious material consequence.
That falls on us, and labor, and anybody else they can push it on to.
Harvard MBA teaches what?
Push cost and risk away from the enterprise. Externalize as much of it as you can, so that the rest is a win.
Consider not ever phrasing this garbage as a loss. Doing this is hard, because everybody does it. Comes from the top. Business oriented media is going to parrot the big company line, and the line is anything below expectations is a loss, which quite simply isn't true.
It is a loss in the sense that revenue by percentage isn't what it was before. However, that reality is often simply phrased as "loss", with the implication being somehow the company didn't profit, when it did, just not to the degree expected.
That's it. Some thoughts I wanted to share.
Get out and vote people. Look at this cool thing we have going in Oregon!
https://didtheyvote.org/
See? Good things come to those who got this far. The application scans your friends from Facebook and looks at the Oregon database of people who have not yet voted. Once you vote, you are removed from that query result. So it matches them up and presents you with a quick and easy way to send them a note and share the app and get them to vote all in one package.
I had only one friend who has not yet voted! She messaged me back and said she would get right on it tomorrow. Spiffy!