That's a weird thought.
Can I assume that making people work and making money are the same thing? We've tended to do that in the past. The basic rule has been just keep everybody and everything out here work- ing all the time; keep pushing that product out the door. And when there isn't any work to do, make some. And when we can't make work, shift people around. And when you still can't make them work, lay them off.
I look around and most people are working. Idle people in here are the exception. Just about everybody is working nearly all the time. And we're not making money.
Some stairs zig-zag up one of the walls, access to one of the overhead cranes. I climb them until I am halfway to the roof and can look out over the plant from one of the landings.
Every moment, lots and lots of things are happening down there. Practically everything I'm seeing is a variable. The com- plexity in this plant-in any manufacturing plant-is mind-bog- gling if you contemplate it. Situations on the floor are always changing. How can I possibly control what goes on? How the hell am I supposed to know if any action in the plant is productive or non-productive toward making money?
The answer is supposed to be in my briefcase, which is heavy in my hand. It's filled with all those reports and printouts and stuff that Lou gave me for the meeting.
We do have lots of measurements that are supposed to tell us if we're productive. But what they really tell us are things like whether somebody down there "worked" for all the hours we paid him or her to work. They tell us whether the output per hour met our standard for the job. They tell us the "cost of prod- ucts," they tell us "direct labor variances," all that stuff. But how do I really know if what happens here is making money for us, or
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whether we're just playing accounting games? There must be a connection, but how do I define it?
I shuffle back down the stairs.
Maybe I should just dash off a blistering memo on the evil of reading newspapers on the job. Think that'll put us back in the black?
By the time I finally set foot inside my office, it is past five o'clock and most of the people who might have been waiting for me are gone. Fran was probably one of the first ones out the door. But she has left me all their messages. I can barely see the phone under them. Half of the messages seem to be from Bill Peach. I guess he caught my disappearing act.
With reluctance, I pick up the phone and dial his number. But God is merciful. It rings for a straight two minutes; no an- swer. I breathe quietly and hang up.
Sitting back in my chair, looking out at the reddish-gold of late afternoon, I keep thinking about measurements, about all the ways we use to evaluate performance: meeting schedules and due dates, inventory turns, total sales, total expenses. Is there a sim- plified way to know if we're making money?
There is a soft knock at the door.
I turn. It's Lou.
As I mentioned earlier, Lou is the plant controller. He's a paunchy, older man who is about two years away from retire- ment. In the best accountants' tradition, he wears horn-rimmed bifocal glasses. Even though he dresses in expensive suits, some- how he always seems to look a little frumpled. He came here from corporate about twenty years ago. His hair is snow white. I think his reason for living is to go to the CPA conventions and bust loose. Most of the time, he's very mild-mannered-until you try to put something over on him. Then he turns into Godzilla.
"Hi," he says from the door.
I roll my hand, motioning him to come in.
"Just wanted to mention to you that Bill Peach called this afternoon," says Lou. "Weren't you supposed to be in a meeting with him today?"
"What did Bill want?" I ask, ignoring the question.
"He needed some updates on some figures," he says. "He seemed kind of miffed that you weren't here."
"Did you get him what he needed?" I ask.
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"Yeah, most of it," Lou says. "I sent it to him; he should get it in the morning. Most of it was like the stuff I gave you."
"What about the rest?"
"Just a few things I have to pull together," he says. "I should have it sometime tomorrow."
"Let me see it before it goes, okay?" I say. "Just so I know."
"Oh, sure," says Lou.
"Hey, you got a minute?"
"Yeah, what's up?" he asks, probably expecting me to give him the rundown on what's going on between me and Peach.
"Sit down," I tell him.
Lou pulls up a chair.
I think for a second, trying to phrase this correctly. Lou waits rxpectantly.
"This is just a simple, fundamental question," I say.
Lou smiles. "Those are the kind I like."
"Would you say the goal of this company is to make money?"
He bursts out laughing.
"Are you kidding?" he asks. "Is this a trick question?"
"No, just tell me."
"Of course it's to make money!" he says.
I repeat it to him: "So the goal of the company is to make money, right?"
"Yeah," he says. "We have to produce products, too."
"Okay, now wait a minute," I tell him. "Producing products a just a means to achieve the goal."
I run through the basic line of reasoning with him. He lis- tens. He's a fairly bright guy, Lou. You don't have to explain ery little thing to him. At the end of it all, he agrees with me.
"So what are you driving at?"
"How do we know if we're making money?"
"Well, there are a lot of ways," he says.
For the next few minutes, Lou goes on about total sales, and market share, and profitability, and dividends paid to stockhold- ers, and so on. Finally, I hold up my hand.
"Let me put it this way," I say. "Suppose you're going to re-.-. rite the textbooks. Suppose you don't have all those terms and vou have to make them up as you go along. What would be the minimum number of measurements you would need in order to know if we are making money?"
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Lou puts a finger alongside his face and squints through his bifocals at his shoe .
"Well, you'd have to have some kind of absolute measure- ment," he says. "Something to tell you in dollars or yen or what- ever just how much money you've made."
"Something like net profit, right?" I ask.
"Yeah, net profit," he says. "But you'd need more than just that. Because an absolute measurement isn't going to tell you much."
"Oh yeah?" I say. "If I know how much money I've made, why do I need to know anything else? You follow me? If I add up what I've made, and I subtract my expenses, and I get my net profit-what else do I need to know? I've made, say, $10 million, or $20 million, or whatever."
For a fraction of a second, Lou gets a glint in his eye like I'm real dumb.
"All right," he says. "Let's say you figure it out and you come up with $10 million net profit... an absolute measurement. Offhand, that sounds like a lot of money, like you really raked it in. But how much did you start with?"
He pauses for effect.
"You see? How much did it take to make that $10 million? Was it just a million dollars? Then you made ten times more money than you invested. Ten to one. That's pretty goddamned good. But let's say you invested a billion dollars. And you only made a lousy ten million bucks? That's pretty bad."