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The Bottom Line Tells You Nothing Their preoccupation with the profits have supplied the evidence of their failure. The income a corporation generates is the byproduct of it's functions. If an entity exists for income alone it will fail. Since when does a person put in a business plan, "to make a living" as the reason for starting a business? But, you know what, when you say, "is the bottom line all that matters?" and you hear all those ignoramuses chime up in that agro tone "yeah!", you know what, to hell with them. You need to cut them loose and let them go. Anyone like that, dissociate yourself from them. They are already extinct and they will only drag you and everyone else down. You know why the country is on the rebound? It's that way in spite of Wall Street and all the rest of those cronies. You know why the recovery was so gradual? The street held it back with all those sell-outs. Every time the market rose, they sold. But the economy recovered in spite of those leaches like a water buffalo wading out of a river. But you see what's going on? The leaches are getting a free ride. All your hard work is going down the drain to enrich a bunch of do-nothing speculators. There's your apocalypse right there. If they keep it up that alone could make a new bottom line: the extinction of mankind. That's what the black picture reveals, an end, the outcome of something so cataclysmic it'll drive the survivors, if any, back to the bronze age. Better go shopping for a nice cave, -- compliments of Wall Street and company. Now, the thing to look for is initiative. The capacity for a company to provide some highly desirable or some desperately needed function that the customer, patron, or beneficiary deems a priority in necessity. You may argue that the bottom line reflects that, but if you check the stats, you'll see as those cook-the-bookers have already proven, that it's a lean horse for a long race, and it's those entities that redirect a sizable portion in what leads to the bottom line that will prove to come out ahead. Come on. Get real. Something may have a magnificent 'bottom line' today and then whoosh! Here comes every imitator in the book and while it's the best form of flattery, flattery gets you nowhere and number one is out on it's bum unless it uses aggressive initiative to keep blossoming new prime innovations. The bottom line tells you nothing. Nothing. The company's reserves give you a better picture, but the primary picture is how profit is redirected to new initiatives and how older initiatives are succeeding. Even if there are more failures than successes, that still doesn't tell you much except maybe R and D is on the ball. The street doesn't know that. Their so-called expectations have destroyed more good companies than they have helped. Like the cow from the Midwest complaining that the computer business is cut-throat. Sure it is if you're still putting in mother boards and hard drives. So where is the trinary cpu? Where is the electric modem (one that uses electrical signals over the phone wires instead of sound signals converted to electric signals)? Where is the interchangeable minimal power-user operating system (these days we only have the lite version) on it's own dedicated hard drive? Do you think the slump was the only reason business didn't upgrade! Come on. You think you can go business as usual and survive? Now here comes the foreign competitor and some others who can show you how it's done. Because they're better at business as usual. You were the front-runner until you handed all your innovators their pink slips. The United States is writing the textbook on how not to do it and it'll be out in a decade or less. Why now. Because a while back when they knew better, they were new Americans from Europe that had that textbook on how not to do it. Throw out the bottom liners. Throw out the bums. They are the downer cattle that have been cannibalizing so long they can't see straight. They've got "mad cash-cow disease". Destroy the herd (or send 'em to the old folks home, we're humane after all) before the customers find out, so when they find out they'll find out you fixed it before it got worse. And before some global dictator decides to turn the whole darn country into the next ground zero. Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved. |