Good Revenue Quotes

A good psychologist will take already-traumatic events in your life and work with you to contextualize them as non-traumatic. A bad psychologist will take non-traumatic events in your life and twist your narrative to both make them traumatic and connect them to your current problems. The problem is that good psychologists solve your issues while bad ones create dependency and thus recurring revenue streams.

A good management style will make the productivity of your employees go up which means your revenues and profits go up as well.

personally my ambition is to get my time as a cockroach shortened for good behavior and be promoted to a revenue officer it is not much of a step up but i am humble

It's a good feeling when your business has paid all of it's bills.

…money and honour have no attraction for them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help — not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present…

Efficiency is a major key to business success. It’s good when a business can do more with less. Not out of scarcity but out of efficiency. When a business does more with less, the result is more revenues produced from less investment… More revenues produced with less expenses… more customers attracted with less marketing activity…. More savings with less trade-off… Businesses that do more with less are rewarded with greater profits and greater capital.

Children are often called our greatest resource, as if they were deposits of tin. But a child is not (just as an adult is not) a lever in an economic machine, a vehicle for commerce, a revenue source for the all-powerful state. He is a human being, made in the image and likeness of God— made, that is, for goodness and truth and beauty.

Millions of business people are each constantly forced to choose between their desire to not be a bad person and their desire to be a good business person, that is to say, to make as much money as they possibly can by maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cost of producing whatever it is that they sell.

With managing a business, you need to Invest in good software and or good data mining systems. Run your numbers routinely. Take a look at your revenues - when is the money typically coming in, from where, can you identify any patterns in your revenues? Then take a look at your expenses - analyze the numbers and identify patterns. Why? Because Identifying patterns and extracting actionable items from your revenue and expense data will result in the clarity you need to make good business decisions.

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

In a truly civilized society there wouldn't be any billionaire, nor will there be any homeless, for all the revenue generated through taxing the rich would be distributed among the people through welfare initiatives.

[I]f the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded.

Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as our own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. ... Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows—to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labour in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not be taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it. If your success is measured by quarterly earnings, you will optimize sales, revenue, and accounting for quarterly earnings. If your success is measured by a lower number on the scale, you will optimize for a lower number on the scale, even if that means embracing crash diets, juice cleanses, and fat-loss pills. The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played. This pitfall is evident in many areas of life. We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done. We care more about getting ten thousand steps than we do about being healthy. We teach for standardized tests instead of emphasizing learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. In short, we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior. This is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Good customer service is a revenue generator.

There was a fire at the Inland Revenue office in London, but it was put out before any serious good was done.

WHO OWNS THE MEDIA? Most Americans have very little understanding of the degree to which media ownership in America—what we see, hear, and read—is concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations. In fact, I suspect that when people look at the hundreds of channels they receive on their cable system, or the many hundreds of magazines they can choose from in a good bookstore, they assume that there is a wide diversity of ownership. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In 1983 the largest fifty corporations controlled 90 percent of the media. That’s a high level of concentration. Today, as a result of massive mergers and takeovers, six corporations control 90 percent of what we see, hear, and read. This is outrageous, and a real threat to our democracy. Those six corporations are Comcast, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS. In 2010, the total revenue of these six corporations was $275 billion. In a recent article in Forbes magazine discussing media ownership, the headline appropriately read: “These 15 Billionaires Own America’s News Media Companies.” Exploding technology is transforming the media world, and mergers and takeovers are changing the nature of ownership. Freepress.net is one of the best media watchdog organizations in the country, and has been opposed to the kind of media consolidation that we have seen in recent years. It has put together a very powerful description of what media concentration means.

But money doesn’t work in the sense that labor or tangible capital expends effort to produce commodities. Credit is debt, and debt extracts interest. Financial salesmen who promise investors, “Make your money work for you” actually mean that society should work for the creditors — and that means for the banks that create credit. The effect is to turn the economic surplus into a flow of interest payments, diverting revenue from tangible capital investment. As the economy’s reproductive powers are dried up, the financialization process is kept going by easing credit terms and lending — not to produce more goods and services, but to bid up prices for the real estate, stocks and bonds being pledged as collateral for larger and larger loans.

I don’t want other companies, I want this one,' insisted Seidelmeyer. 'I want all of their revenue and none of their people.' 'None of their people?' echoed Feretti. 'That’s good margin.

Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by take-over or bankruptcy; half of today’s biggest companies did not even exist in 1980. The same is not true of government monopolies: the Internal Revenue Service and the National Health Service will not die, however much incompetence they might display. Yet most anti-corporate activists have faith in the good will of the leviathans that can force you to do business with them, but are suspicious of the behemoths that have to beg for your business. I find that odd. Moreover,

I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations, where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.

However, to maintain a good credit rating during periods when revenue is lagging, municipalities must fuck over residents by implementing austerity measures such as firing public employees, cutting pension funds and health-care benefits, weakening the power of labor unions, cutting the education budget, and so forth.

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic.

There are days on which Julia does not open letters. She is overcome, as I understand it, by a sort of superstitious dread, in which she is persuaded that letters bode her no good: they will be from the Gas Board, and demand money; or from the Inland Revenue, and demand accounts; or from some much valued friend, and demand an answer.

The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?

For the existing enterprise, whether business or public-service institution, the controlling word in the term ‘entrepreneurial management’ is ‘entrepreneurial’. For the new venture, it is ‘management’. In the existing business, it is the existing that is the main obstacle to entrepreneurship. In the new venture, it is its absence. The new venture has an idea. It may have a product or a service. It may even have sales, and sometimes quite a substantial volume of them. It surely has costs. And it may have revenues and even profits. What it does not have is a ‘business’, a viable, operating, organized ‘present’ in which people know where they are going, what they are supposed to do, and what the results are or should be. But unless a new venture develops into a new business and makes sure of being ‘managed’, it will not survive no matter how brilliant the entrepreneurial idea, how much money it attracts, how good its products, nor even how great the demand for them.

Hence, democracies escape Hobbes’s state of nature and autocracies generally don’t. Indeed, we can see just how dramatic the difference is in escaping the state of nature by looking at what happens when nature exercises its freedom to wreak havoc. We have in mind the consequences of natural disasters like earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, and drought. These certainly are not political events, but their consequences are the product of how rulers best allocate revenue and how people’s freedom to organize shape allocation decisions.

have kitchens, who have liveries, who make good cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who strut about, a lackey before, a lackey behind, in a gala coach, and who have palaces, and who roll in their carriages in the name of Jesus Christ who went barefoot! You are a prelate,—revenues, palace, horses, servants, good table, all the sensualities of life; you have this like the rest, and like the rest, you enjoy it; it is well; but this says either too much or too little; this does not enlighten me upon the intrinsic and essential value of the man

British colonial policy, quite simply, sought revenue for the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.

[I]n most states the trader is under the necessity of lading his vessel with some merchandise or other in exchange for his cargo, since the current coin has no circulation beyond the frontier. But at Athens he has a choice: he can either in return for his wares export a variety of goods, such as human beings seek after, or, if he does not desire to take goods in exchange for goods, he has simply to export silver, and he cannot have a more excellent freight to export, since wherever he likes to sell it he may look to realise a large percentage on his capital.

The attitude of the Bodrugans to his idea of letting a poacher off with a warning was, he knew, the attitude all society would adopt, though they might dress it in politer phrases. Even Cornish society, which looked with such tolerance on the smuggler. The smuggler was a clever fellow who knew how to cheat the government of its revenues and bring them brandy at half price. The poacher not only trespassed literally upon someone’s land, he trespassed metaphorically upon all the inalienable rights of personal property. He was an outlaw and a felon. Hanging was barely good enough.

We had a massive budget shortfall with a structural budget deficit and seemingly no way to close it; the city had been spending at levels way beyond its recurring revenue for years, and the nonrecurring revenue streams were drying up as we entered office, leaving us with no good options. The structural deficit was about $180 million on a roughly $600 million general fund—which meant that if we were to eliminate our debt, we would have to develop or attract new housing and businesses that could generate tax income, identify other sources of revenue, or cut our government by one-third.

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.

But we must all be conscious of the power of our archaic internal dialogues. Of how they weave themselves through our public discourses and our unspoken expectations of each other. Good provider? Think it over. What are you doing to a man when you call him a good provider? Are you normalizing and reinforcing the Man Box paradigm of a man who sacrifices his emotional expression and hidden aspirations to insure a steady stream of revenue for his family? Are you relegating him to some space outside the daily emotional sphere of the family and by extension, depriving the family of crucial male emotional modeling and connection?

And do ye know what “the universe” is to my mind? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This universe is a monster of energy, without beginning or end; a fixed and brazen quantity of energy which grows neither bigger nor smaller, which does not consume itself, but only alters its face; as a whole its bulk is immutable, it is a household without either losses or gains, but likewise without increase and without sources of revenue, surrounded by nonentity as by a frontier. It is nothing vague or wasteful, it does not stretch into infinity; but is a definite quantum of energy located in limited space, and not in space which would be anywhere empty. It is rather energy everywhere, the play of forces and force-waves, at the same time one and many, agglomerating here and diminishing there, a sea of forces storming and raging in itself, for ever changing, for ever rolling back over incalculable ages to recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms, producing the most complicated things out of the most simple structures; producing the most ardent, most savage, and most contradictory things out of the quietest, most rigid, and most frozen material, and then returning from multifariousness to uniformity, from the play of contradictions back into the delight of consonance, saying yea unto itself, even in this homogeneity of its courses and ages; for ever blessing itself as something which recurs for all eternity, — a becoming which knows not satiety, or disgust, or weariness: — this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, of eternal self-destruction, this mysterious world of twofold voluptuousness; this, my “Beyond Good and Evil,” without aim, unless there is an aim in the bliss of the circle, without will, unless a ring must by nature keep goodwill to itself, — would you have a name for my world? A solution of all your riddles? Do ye also want a light, ye most concealed, strongest and most

Let me remind you again that when you put a book out there, you are a published author in a space where you are an expert. Your book becomes the ultimate business card, not to mention a source of ongoing revenue. Did someone say “ongoing revenue?”. Who does not need to make some extra money on a regular basis? Realize that this book will take some work to complete once, but thereafter it exists forever – working to bring you royalty checks five, ten, twenty years from now. Money will be consistently flowing into your bank account. If you write a good book that provides real value, then you realistically have a revenue stream which will bring income for decades to come.

Sonnet of Consumerism Ever wonder in a world of consumerism, Who's the consumer, who's the product! You may think that you are the one owning things, But it's the things that own you, head and heart. When unmoderated materialism is the world's norm, Consumer is the product, product does the consuming. And this insanity is revered as industrial growth, Then they wonder, why is there so much suffering! The point is, your insecurity is good for business, The shallower you are, the more your pocket empties. But if you don't wanna end up at la casa de loco, Stop living in products and focus on memories. Corporations chasing revenue cause economic disparity. Buy less, buy local, to construct a sustainable economy.

After hearing visionaries like Vikram Sarabhai and working at T.E.R.L.S. I began to understand that being self sufficient also meant developing our own technologies and using that for the good of the nation. Our satellites provide many benefits to the ordinary people of the country—from communication to information that is utilized by soldiers, fishermen, farmers, teachers, students and people from almost every walk of life. By making our own rockets that could go into space and put satellites into orbit or touch the surface of the moon or even reach Mars, we have become a nation that is respected for our technological capabilities. Our satellite launch vehicles and facilities bring in valuable revenue when they are used by other countries.

But though I seem to be the father, I am the stepfather of Don Quixote, and I do not wish to go along with the common custom and implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to forgive or ignore the faults you may find in this my child, for you are neither his kin nor his friend, and you have a soul in your body and a will as free as anyone’s, and you are in your own house, where you are lord, as the sovereign is master of his revenues, and you know the old saying: under cover of my cloak I can kill the king. Which exempts and excuses you from all respect and obligation, and you can say anything you desire about this history without fear that you will be reviled for the bad things or rewarded for the good that you might say about it.

Of course you know that ambition and avarice are held to be, as indeed they are, a disgrace? Very true. And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for them; go- od men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the rea- son why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help–not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themsel- ves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of con- tention as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest, but that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather to receive a bene- fit from another than to have the trouble of conferring one.

In fact, as these companies offered more and more (simply because they could), they found that demand actually followed supply. The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. Whether it was latent demand for niche goods that was already there or a creation of new demand, we don't yet know. But what we do know is that the companies for which we have the most complete data - netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody - sales of products not offered by their bricks-and-mortar competitors amounted to between a quarter and nearly half of total revenues - and that percentage is rising each year. in other words, the fastest-growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren't available in traditional, physical retail stores at all. These infinite-shelf-space businesses have effectively learned a lesson in new math: A very, very big number (the products in the Tail) multiplied by a relatives small number (the sales of each) is still equal to a very, very big number. And, again, that very, very big number is only getting bigger. What's more, these millions of fringe sales are an efficient, cost-effective business. With no shelf space to pay for - and in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees - a niche product sold is just another sale, with the same (or better) margins as a hit. For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

Trump wanted to know what the new individual income tax rates would be. “I like these big round numbers,” he said. “Ten percent, 20 percent, 25 percent.” Good, solid numbers that would be easy to sell. Mnuchin, Cohn and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said there needed to be analysis, study and discussion on the impact on revenue, the deficit and the relation to expected federal spending. “I want to know what the numbers are going to be,” Trump said, throwing out numbers again. “I think they ought to be 10, 20 and 25.” He dismissed any effort to crunch the numbers. A small change in rates could have a surprising impact on taxes collected by the U.S. Treasury. “I don’t care about any of that,” Trump said. Solid, round numbers were key. “That’s what people can understand,” he said. “That’s how I’m going to sell it.

The whole village has been drunk for the last three days. And as for feast days, it is simply horrible to think of! It has been proved conclusively that alcohol does no good in any case, but invariably does harm, and it has been demonstrated to be an absolute poison. Then, ninety-nine percent of the crimes in the world are committed through its influence. We all know how the standard of morality and the general welfare improved at once in all the countries where drinking has been suppressed—like Sweden and Finland, and we know that it can be suppressed by exercising a moral influence over the masses. But in our country the class which could exert that influence—the Government, the Tsar and his officials—simply encourage drink. Their main revenues are drawn from the continual drunkenness of the people. They drink themselves—they are always drinking the health of somebody: ‘Gentlemen, the Regiment!’ The priests drink, the bishops drink—

The current crisis has led to renewed discussions about a universal basic income, whereby all citizens receive an equal regular payment from the government, regardless of whether they work. The idea behind this policy is a good one, but the narrative would be problematic. Since a universal basic income is seen as a handout, it perpetuates the false notion that the private sector is the sole creator, not a co-creator, of wealth in the economy and that the public sector is merely a toll collector, siphoning off profits and distributing them as charity. A better alternative is a citizen’s dividend. Under this policy, the government takes a percentage of the wealth created with government investments, puts that money in a fund, and then shares the proceeds with the people. The idea is to directly reward citizens with a share of the wealth they have created. Alaska, for example, has distributed oil revenues to residents through an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund since 1982.

Mr. Colbert, the famous minister of Louis XIV, was a man of probity, of great industry and knowledge of detail, of great experience and acuteness in the examination of public accounts, and of abilities, in short, every way fitted for introducing method and good order into the collection and expenditure of the public revenue. That minister had unfortunately embraced all the prejudices of the mercantile system, in its nature and essence a system of restraint and regulation, and such as could scarce fail to be agreeable to a laborious and plodding man of business, who had been accustomed to regulate the different departments of public offices, and to establish the necessary checks and controls for confining each to its proper sphere. The industry and commerce of a great country he endeavoured to regulate upon the same model as the departments of a public office; and instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice, he bestowed upon certain branches of industry extraordinary privileges, while he laid others under as extraordinary restraints.

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern businesspeople and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales. The legend of Peugeot affords us a good example. An icon that somewhat resembles the Stadel lion-man appears today on cars, trucks and motorcycles from Paris to Sydney. It’s the hood ornament that adorns vehicles made by Peugeot, one of the oldest and largest of Europe’s carmakers. Peugeot began as a small family business in the village of Valentigney, just 200 miles from the Stadel Cave. Today the company employs about 200,000 people worldwide, most of whom are complete strangers to each other. These strangers cooperate so effectively that in 2008 Peugeot produced more than 1.5 million automobiles, earning revenues of about 55 billion euros.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

THE GLOBE | Unlocking the Wealth in Rural Markets Mamta Kapur, Sanjay Dawar, and Vineet R. Ahuja | 151 words In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors—researchers with Accenture—conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged—for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones. Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers. Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations. Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers’ welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.

Under these circumstances, revenue from the New World in the form of exports of gold and silver was critical. The Spanish government, however, imposed strict rules limiting economic exchange—a system known as mercantilism—under the mistaken belief that this would maximize its income from the colonies. Exports from the New World could go only to Spain, indeed, to a single port in Spain; they were required to travel in Spanish ships; and the colonies were not permitted to compete with Spanish producers of manufactured goods. Mercantilism, as Adam Smith was to demonstrate in The Wealth of Nations, created huge inefficiencies and was highly detrimental to economic growth. It also had very significant political consequences: access to markets and the right to make productive economic investments were limited to individuals or corporations favored by the state. This meant that the route to personal wealth lay through the state and through gaining political influence. This then led to a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial mentality, in which energy was spent seeking political favor rather than initiating new enterprises that would create wealth. The landowning and merchant classes that emerged under this system grew rich because of the political protection they received from the state.

Or again, supposing prizes were offered to the magistrates in charge of the market for equitable and speedy settlements of points in dispute to enable any one so wishing to proceed on his voyage without hindrance, the result would be that far more traders would trade with us and with greater satisfaction. It would indeed be a good and noble institution to pay special marks of honour, such as the privilege of the front seat, to merchants and shipowners, and on occasion to invite to hospitable entertainment those who, through something notable in the quality of ship or merchandise, may claim to have done the state a service. The recipients of these honours will rush into our arms as friends, not only under the incentive of gain, but of distinction also. Now the greater the number of people attracted to Athens either as visitors or as residents, clearly the greater the development of imports and exports. More goods will be sent out of the country, there will be more buying and selling, with a consequent influx of money in the shape of rents to individuals and dues and customs to the state exchequer. And to secure this augmentation of the revenues, mind you, not the outlay of one single penny; nothing needed beyond one or two philanthropic measures and certain details of supervision.

I am of opinion that if the names of contributors were to be inscribed as benefactors for all time, many foreigners would be induced to contribute, and possibly not a few states, in their desire to obtain the right of inscription; indeed I anticipate that some kings, tyrants, and satraps will display a keen desire to share in such a favour. [...] Were such a capital once furnished, it would be a magnificent plan to build lodging-houses for the benefit of shipmasters in the neighbourhood of the harbours, in addition to those which exist; and again, on the same principle, suitable places of meeting for merchants, for the purposes of buying and selling; and thirdly, public lodging-houses for persons visiting the city. Again, supposing dwelling-houses and stores for vending goods were fitted up for retail dealers in Piraeus and the city, they would at once be an ornament to the state and a fertile source of revenue. Also it seems to me it would be a good thing to try and see if, on the principle on which at present the state possesses public warships, it would not be possible to secure public merchant vessels, to be let out on the security of guarantors just like any other public property. If the plan were found feasible this public merchant navy would be a large source of extra revenue.

Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures. Bravo for Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He is a contemporary master at ensuring dependence on a small coalition. Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. After all, a large selectorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being replaced. Bravo to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for introducing universal adult suffrage in Russia’s old rigged election system. Lenin mastered the art of creating a vast supply of interchangeables. Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy. Bravo to Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari, estimated to be worth up to $4 billion even as he governs a country near the world’s bottom in per capita income.

Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debts because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality: “States, like individuals, who observe their engagements are respected and trusted, while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct.”The proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy. Used as loan collateral, government bonds could function as money—and it was the scarcity of money, Hamilton observed, that had crippled the economy and resulted in severe deflation in the value of land. America was a young country rich in opportunity. It lacked only liquid capital, and government debt could supply that gaping deficiency. The secret of managing government debt was to fund it properly by setting aside revenues at regular intervals to service interest and pay off principal. Hamilton refuted charges that his funding scheme would feed speculation. Quite the contrary: if investors knew for sure that government bonds would be paid off, the prices would not fluctuate wildly, depriving speculators of opportunities to exploit. What mattered was that people trusted the government to make good on repayment: “In nothing are appearances of greater moment than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it and this is affected by appearances as well as realities.” Hamilton intuited that public relations and confidence building were to be the special burdens of every future treasury secretary.

The successful individual sales producer wins by being as selfish as possible with her time. The more often the salesperson stays away from team members and distractions, puts her phone on Do Not Disturb (DND), closes her door, or chooses to work for a few hours from the local Panera Bread café, the more productive she’ll likely be. In general, top producers in sales tend to exhibit a characteristic I’ve come to describe as being selfishly productive. The seller who best blocks out the rest of the world, who maintains obsessive control of her calendar, who masters focusing solely on her own highest-value revenue-producing activities, who isn’t known for being a “team player,” and who is not interested in playing good corporate citizen or helping everyone around her, is typically a highly effective seller who ends up on top of the sales rankings. Contrary to popular opinion, being selfish is not bad at all. In fact, for an individual contributor salesperson, it is a highly desirable trait and a survival skill, particularly in today’s crazed corporate environment where everyone is looking to put meetings on your calendar and take you away from your primary responsibilities! Now let’s switch gears and look at the sales manager’s role and responsibilities. How well would it work to have a sales manager who kept her office phone on DND and declined almost every incoming call to her mobile phone? Do we want a sales manager who closes her office door, is concerned only about herself, and is for the most part inaccessible? No, of course not. The successful sales manager doesn’t win on her own; she wins through her people by helping them succeed. Think about other key sales management responsibilities: Leading team meetings. Developing talent. Encouraging hearts. Removing obstacles. Coaching others. Challenging data, false assumptions, wrong attitudes, and complacency. Pushing for more. Putting the needs of your team members ahead of your own. Hmmm. Just reading that list again reminds me why it is often so difficult to transition from being a top producer in sales into a sales management role. Aside from the word sales, there is truly almost nothing similar about the positions. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on corporate responsibilities like participating on the executive committee, dealing with human resources compliance issues, expense management, recruiting, and all the other burdens placed on the sales manager. Again,

Are you looking for adult videos? Well, the one thing we all can agree on is that there is an explosion of websites in this category. However, the old saying that many is not always a good option is true for this category. A number of websites are poor knockoffs. In websites that depend exclusively on advertising for revenue, the visitors end up having to browse through advertisements than actual videos. The question before most visitors is how can we watch free erotic videos? in order to do this we have to create some guidelines with regards to the same. Yes, you may wonder if we are in our senses. However, this practise can help in eliminating bad websites. The first rule we should look for a wide bouquet of categories. Categories play an important part in this industry. The good websites ensure that every single video is listed under the correct category. For example- Bondage videos will be under the BDSM category. Videos featuring mature actors and young actors will fall under the mature or young/old categories. The reason for the division is two- fold. The first is that it makes the navigation easier. The second is that people who do not like a category of videos can safely ignore that category. The second rule we should look at is the relevant disclaimers and certifications. Yes, the adult video industry is highly regulated. While it does it involves pornographic content, the necessary precautions are taken to ensure that no actor/actress faces any health hazard or is subjected to any kind of activity against their will. These form part of the regulations when it comes to distribution of the pornographic content. A good website always has these certificates accessible and can provide them as and when requested. In contrast poor quality websites just display the snapshot of the videos. Also such websites usually copy videos from other websites and paste it on their websites. However, a good video will always have original prints with the relevant copyright permissions. The third rule is the most important when you want to watch free sex videos. Today any video we watch needs to be crystal clear when it comes to quality. Again here is where the good websites stand out. They will always have clear prints and even high definition prints. Again there is a very definite reason behind the same. This makes them stand out in a crowded industry. With browsing speeds increasing on a yearly basis, more and more visitors are looking for high definition videos even in the adult category. The above three rules are essential when it comes to choosing adult video websites. Websites that follow these rules have a definite edge over others. From a visitor’s point of view, better content and properly divided content is a huge plus. It means that they do not have to fall prey to websites that promise a lot and do not deliver in the end.

Trouble free payday loans. A payday loan is your remedy to an immediate have to have for money. A payday loans seems to be rather attractive. If you have a job, you can actually get a payday loan. Occasionally, consumers without having profession can get a payday loan. It is actually not straightforward to modify your spending budget without the need of a loan. You will find a lot of payday loan suppliers. Individuals also give payday loans. Typically, the rate of interest will be the most important aspect of any payday loan. You ought to usually be in a position to pay back the quantity borrowed. A payday loan can be fantastic after you possess a job or else it can be a disaster. You will have dollars deposited within your bank’s saving account around the exact same day. High rates of interest on a loan is usually Pikavippikioski.fi particularly difficult to manage. Payday loans can be a superb quick option but not a long-term solution. You will obtain the money inside your savings or present account. There is an arrangement for direct deduction out of your income created into the account. This can be a approach that may be set to run automatically and also you do not have to accomplish something. It's essential to understand that a payday loan is known as a short-term loan only. You have to spend a larger price of interest on a payday loan. Many people without having a job would need to supply some other safety of repayment. If you have bad credit, a payday loan may be the only answer. You often require a very good credit rating to get a loan. Of all loans, a payday loan will be the most effective and least complicated way for you to get money swiftly. Occasionally folks take out extra than one payday loan. If you usually do not spend the amount on time, the interest begins to add up seriously. It can be important that you just understand almost everything about a payday loan. What takes place when the time comes for trying to repay the loan? Some nations take into account a payday loan as terrible for the individual. The majority of people in no way look at a payday loan from every single angle. You can not acquire plenty of cash if you have pretty small revenue. The interest plus the principal on a payday loan can add up incredibly promptly. The perfect point to perform is pay the interest in addition to a small on the principal quantity each week. A payday loan is anything to assist you more than your immediate complications. You may have seen that banks take a while to agree a loan. In most cases, the interest is normally deducted just before the deposit is produced. The more rapidly you repay the principal amount the much better it is for you, as you have to pay much less as interest. It is best to never ever go in for any payday loan anytime you'll need money. Payday loan corporations are bobbing up all more than the nation. One can find nations exactly where it really is illegal; to charge such high interest rates. The concept behind a payday loan is always to tide you over your immediate issues. A payday loan really should by no means become the norm but it should be an exception. You could have to spend a price in exorbitant rates of interest if you usually do not pay up in time. A payday loan is beneficial for immediate payment of bills.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

Scaling is good if it brings in incremental revenue, but you have to watch for a decrease in engagement, a gradual saturation of the initial market, or a rising cost of customer acquisition. Changes in churn, segmented by channels, show whether you’re growing your most important asset — your customers — or hemorrhaging attention as you scale.

Actual estate is a form of funding Real estate is a form of funding and is shortly being adopted by many individuals. The advantages of real property investments are many as mentioned here.There's a widespread adage that says don't put all your eggs in a single basket. That is the place actual property steps in to provide diversification. Diversification means spreading the danger of your cash. Real estate gives one other way of investing money relatively than investing it multi function place. One other advantage of real estate investment is that it ensures one a supply five on shenton of income for a very long time. It's because actual estate will at all times have shoppers who need to purchase or lease homes or premises for residential or enterprise functions respectively. This form of funding serves as a further income other than the normal wage one receives. Better still while you retire it is going to nonetheless be your revenue source. The other benefit is that one doesn't should be bodily present to get the revenue. Thirdly, you get to have leverage over all OPMS. It's easy for an individual who is in actual property to get a house and pay it off over a long time period. Generally the deal is so good that some brokers get as many as 30 years to pay off their mortgages! It's also a way of leaving one’s legacy behind that will probably be remembered for a few years to come even after one’s demise. Regardless of the very fact of the massive sum of money required to begin, the benefits of real estate investments that you're going to get are simply many.

Many people in sales have never been forced to find new business. Taking care of existing customers has consistently been a reliable way to grow revenue. In good times, there was plenty of demand, and as long as we met the needs of existing customers and maintained a solid relationship we picked up business and everyone was happy.

GM had assets greater than those of Argentina and revenues eight times those of New York State. (Defense Secretary Wilson had had a point in saying that "what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.")

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

With federal and state money drying up, research universities are increasingly trying to monetize their own intellectual property for revenue. In 2012, universities collectively generated $2.6 billion from their patents, a 6.8 percent jump from the previous year, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. Napolitano, of course, knows all of this. The University of California, especially its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, includes some of the biggest players in converting research into licensing fees and startups that might go public or be acquired. Witness the uptick in university-run incubators in the Bay Area. But someone must do the research that leads to those technologies that eventually hit the market, she said. When Napolitano first joined the University of California, one of her top priorities was to increase efficiency - to do more with less. But over time she came to realize that research is anything but efficient. But that's a good thing. "The grace note of basic research is failure," Napolitano said. "It's what doesn't work that leads to unexpected breakthroughs." There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking profit from innovation. But we must first understand that innovation starts when scientists ask how and why. Basic research "is where the action is," she said.

On the other hand, there are a number of cases where economic growth did not produce better governance, but where, to the contrary, it was good governance that was responsible for growth. Consider South Korea and Nigeria. In 1954, following the Korean War, South Korea’s per capita GDP was lower than that of Nigeria, which was to win its independence from Britain in 1960. Over the following fifty years, Nigeria took in more than $300 billion in oil revenues, and yet its per capita income declined in the years between 1975 and 1995. In contrast, South Korea grew at rates ranging from 7 to 9 percent per year over this same period, to the point that it became the world’s twelfth-largest economy by the time of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The reason for this difference in performance is almost entirely attributable to the far superior government that presided over South Korea compared to Nigeria.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

Many talk of the Beast as if it is a greedy, unthinking creature, insistent and beyond our control. But in fact, any group that produces a product or drives revenue could be considered to be part of the Beast, including marketing and distribution. Each group operates according to its own logic, and many have neither the responsibility for the quality of what is produced nor a good understanding of their own impact on that quality. It simply isn’t their problem; keeping the process going and the money flowing is. Each group has its own goals and expectations and acts according to its own appetites.

The knights performed their feats with very little planning and rarely did their post-feat paperwork, but they made up for these shortcomings with their fearlessness, their strength, and their energy. The king was also lucky to have a very good prime minister. The minister saw that taxes were collected, that the majority of the revenues were wisely spent to improve the kingdom, and that the excess monies were well managed. One day the prime minister died, and the king asked his bravest and most fearless knight to be the new minister. Unfortunately, the knight chosen for the job liked jumping on his white charger more than he liked caring for the affairs of the kingdom. He continued to gallop off to slay dragons whenever he had the opportunity and neglected tax collections, investments, improvements, and repairs. After only a short time, the king ran out of money, the peasants ran out of patience, and the kingdom collapsed.

As the producer states gradually forced the major oil companies to share with them more of the profits from oil, increasing quantities of sterling and dollars flowed to the Middle East. To maintain the balance of payments and the viability of the international financial system, Britain and the United States needed a mechanism for these currency flows to be returned. [...] The purchase of most goods, whether consumable materials like food and clothing or more durable items such as cars or industrial machinery, sooner or later reaches a limit where, in practical terms, no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Given the enormous size of oil revenues, and the relatively small populations and widespread poverty of many of the countries beginning to accumulate them, ordinary goods could not be purchased at a rate that would go far to balance the flow of dollars (and many could be bought from third countries, like Germany and Japan – purchases that would not improve the dollar problem). Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification. Under the appropriate doctrines of security, ever-larger acquisitions could be rationalised on the grounds that they would make the need to use them less likely. Certain weapons, such as US fighter aircraft, were becoming so technically complex by the 1960s that a single item might cost over $10 million, offering a particularly compact vehicle for recycling dollars. Arms, therefore, could be purchased in quantities unlimited by any practical need or capacity to consume. As petrodollars flowed increasingly to the Middle East, the sale of expensive weaponry provided a unique apparatus for recycling those dollars – one that could expand without any normal commercial constraint.

Of course you want more revenue, but what good is it if it isn’t predictable?

The one-year pilot program could be broadened if successful. City officials expect to pick winners by early summer, and public hearings will be held. The bids are expected to bring in new revenue for the city. But City Hall officials say the primary goal is to encourage more people to ditch their cars, eventually opening up more spaces. In weighing the bids, the Walsh administration will consider geographic factors, in part to put some of the designated spaces in places without good rapid transit options. “For certain neighborhoods and certain areas of the city . . . car-sharing could be a more affordable option than owning a car and finding a place to park it,’’ City Councilor Michelle Wu said. “The question is, where are these spots coming from and what does the parking situation look like for residents in those neighborhoods already?’’ Boston-based Zipcar, a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group, and Enterprise Holdings are likely to bid for the designated spaces as a way to expand their substantial local operations. Zipcar, for example, already has approximately 1,200 vehicles in and around the city. Nearly all of those cars are now parked on private property.

Guideline #5: Select your vocabulary with meticulous care. Did you increase sales or orchestrate explosive growth in revenues? Did you provide good levels of customer service or unparalleled levels of quality customer service? As a receptionist, did you merely greet people, or were you the manager of first impressions? Are you a good problem solver, or can you resolve complex technical issues professionally and expeditiously? Words are power, and keywords and phrases are powerful agents for eliciting the right emotions to enthusiastically engage prospective employers to want to read your document. Well-chosen words can be the difference between an interview and a missed opportunity, so select your words and messages with painstaking precision.

Similar service providers are using smartphones to rejigger local logistics. Over the years many firms have tried to turn the delivery of groceries and other goods into a big business. The latest generation is much more likely to succeed thanks to the smartphones of freelance personal shoppers ready to jump into action should something need to be picked up. Instacart, one of the biggest such services, has contracts with more than 4,000 of them in 15 American cities. It has grown from $1m in revenues in 2012 to $100m last year. Such business models are not without critics; the way that “Plattform-Kapitalismus” integrates people’s lives and livelihoods ever more thoroughly into a network of market transactions is an increasing concern on the European left.

Average human life expectancy in North America was at an all-time high: seventy-five years.  Up significantly in the past forty years.               “But many people, particularly the baby boomers, are healthier than previous generations.  Incidences of new cancer have slowed, and less people are getting diabetes and heart disease. Or they’re getting them under control through diet, exercise, and existing medicine. “That’s all bad news for us.  The revenue from the drugs we use to treat those illnesses is steady or declining.  Worse still, many of our cash cow drugs are losing patent protection soon.  Not good for us.”               “We need new kinds of sick people.  We need new revenue streams,

Growth Hacker Is the New VP [of] Marketing.” What? I was a VP of marketing. I quite liked my job. I was good at it, too. Self-taught, self-made, I was, at twenty-five, helping to lead the efforts of a publicly traded company with 250 stores in twenty countries and more than $600 million in revenue. But the writer, Andrew Chen, an influential technologist and entrepreneur, didn’t care about any of that. According to him, my colleagues and I would soon be out of a job—someone was waiting in the wings to replace us. The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part

GOOD PRODUCT MANAGER/BAD PRODUCT MANAGER Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product. They are responsible for right product/right time and all that entails. A good product manager knows the context going in (the company, our revenue funding, competition, etc.), and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan (no

Times were good. No, they were great. My company had just passed six figures in revenue, and it was headed to break the seven-figure mark. My team grew to almost twenty people, all of whom were passionate about the business and exceeded my expectations. Various local and national publications were calling me to secure an interview so that they could highlight me, a young entrepreneur with great potential.

As a central distributor of goods, the welfare state necessitates high levels of taxation, and it must institute extensive programmes of economic regulation in order to ensure that sufficient tax revenue is generated. Excessive taxation, consequently, always occurs where the political system inadequately manages its ‘opening and restriction’ towards the economy, and where it assumes co-ordinating power in influencing the economic conditions in which citizens live. High-level taxation, however, inevitably leads to economic problems – to problems registered in the medium of money, but caused by the medium of power. These problems might, for instance, take the form of possible underproduction, flight of capital, loss of investment potential, or increasing prices, imbalances in the relation of supply and demand in the private economy, difficulties in the circulation of capital, worsening international competitiveness of firms, or excessive regulation of available capital by central banks. All such tendencies, in Luhmann’s view, characterize societies which are drifting away from the ideal condition of realized plural differentiation towards a more authoritarian (less differentiated) mode of political economy.

Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. Even if the AAA had helped farmers by curtailing supplies and raising prices, it could have done so only by hurting millions of others who had to pay those prices or make do with less to eat. Perhaps

At first, the American war effort faced financial difficulties. In 1842, the government, in an effort to protect growing American industries and, as Southerners would say, to force them to buy eastern goods, set a high tariff on imports. While the tariff was successful in stifling foreign competition, it also drastically reduced government revenues and put severe limitations on the extension of international credit to American entrepreneurs. Coupled with currency inflation and a slowing of the business cycle, the United States Treasury was hard put to finance a war. At the beginning of hostilities, the treasury held only a small surplus of $7 million. When Polk recommended that the Congress place additional taxes on coffee and tea, the House of Representatives indignantly refused. Polk, however, was able to have passed a new bill lowering tariffs, and by the beginning of 1847 revenues began to increase. The Congress also voted to issue $10 million in new Treasury notes and bonds. Technical

successful entrepreneurs care more about the brutal truth than about being right or looking good. They take responsibility for results, not intentions. It

if information goods are to be distributed at their marginal cost of production—zero—they cannot be created and produced by entrepreneurial firms that use revenues obtained from sales to consumers to cover their [fixed set-up] costs. If

In the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, for example, a group of fishing families had lived since 1914 on islands in the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 1998 the Usina Trapiche sugar refinery petitioned the state to take over the land. The islanders say that the refinery then followed up its petition by destroying their homes and small farms, threatening further violence to those who did not leave. When the fishing families rebuilt their homes, they were burned down. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo use Usina Trapiche sugar in their products, but until Oxfam’s campaign they denied responsibility for the conduct of their suppliers. Oxfam asked all of the Big 10 food brands to show ethical leadership by requiring that their suppliers obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous and local communities before acquiring land. Nestlé was the first to support this principle fully. Then Coca-Cola declared a policy of zero tolerance for landgrabbing by its suppliers and bottlers and committed to disclosing its suppliers of sugar cane, soy, and palm oil, to conducting social, environmental, and human rights assessments, and to engaging with Usina Trapiche regarding the conflict with the people of the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 2014 PepsiCo also accepted the principle of responsibility for its suppliers. Associated British Foods, the largest sugar producer in Africa and another Big 10 food corporation, is now also committed to the same principle.12 The gains from these policy commitments are more difficult to quantify than in the example of Ghana’s oil revenues, but in the long run they too may be very substantial.

Gary Aldrich would later write: Mrs. Clinton [used] security agencies as a hammer to attack and punish those who stood in her way. The FBI, the Secret Service and the Internal Revenue Service hounded and then prosecuted seven innocent men who worked for the White House travel office simply because they were standing in the way of Mrs. Clinton’s political interests and ambitions. She knew federal investigations would destroy those good men, but she wanted her friends in those slots, and that was all that mattered.*

PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.

accrual method of accounting, revenue is recorded as soon as services are provided or goods are delivered, regardless of when cash is received.

So grave were the interstate tensions over trade that Nathaniel Gorham, named president of Congress in 1786, feared that clashes between New York and its neighbors might degenerate into civil war. Similarly acrimonious trade disputes erupted between other states with major seaports and neighbors who imported goods through them. The states were arrogating a right that properly belonged to a central government: the right to formulate trade policy. This persuaded Hamilton that unless a new federal government with a monopoly on customs revenues was established, disunion would surely ensue. As individual states developed interests in their own taxes, they would be less and less likely to sacrifice for the common good. In April 1786, amid a worsening economic crisis, Hamilton agreed that the time had come to act and was elected to a one-year term in the New York Assembly. Later on, he told a Scottish relative that he had been involved in a lucrative legal practice “when the derangement of our public affairs by the feebleness of the general confederation drew me again reluctantly into public life.” His zeal for reform signaled anything but reluctance. He was seized with a crusading sense of purpose and had a momentous, long-term plan to enact. Hamilton told Troup he had stood for election because he planned to “render the next session” of the Assembly “subservient to the change he meditated” in the structure of the national government. Indeed, his election to the Assembly was a preliminary step in an extended sequence of events that led straight to the Constitutional Convention.

The key to affording higher wages (we’re talking frontline employees, not senior leadership) is a lower total wage cost as a percent of revenue. You have to remain competitive, and the best companies know that one great person can replace three good ones. Through rigorous selection (i.e., Topgrading), they get the absolute best talent in the door, pay employees above-market rates, and then invest heavily in training and development to make them more productive.

Though the early growth in Botswana relied on meat exports, things changed dramatically when diamonds were discovered. The management of natural resources in Botswana also differed markedly from that in other African nations. During the colonial period, the Tswana chiefs had attempted to block prospecting for minerals in Bechuanaland because they knew that if Europeans discovered precious metals or stones, their autonomy would be over. The first big diamond discovery was under Ngwato land, Seretse Khama’s traditional homeland. Before the discovery was announced, Khama instigated a change in the law so that all subsoil mineral rights were vested in the nation, not the tribe. This ensured that diamond wealth would not create great inequities in Botswana. It also gave further impetus to the process of state centralization as diamond revenues could now be used for building a state bureaucracy and infrastructure and for investing in education. In Sierra Leone and many other sub-Saharan African nations, diamonds fueled conflict between different groups and helped to sustain civil wars, earning the label Blood Diamonds for the carnage brought about by the wars fought over their control. In Botswana, diamond revenues were managed for the good of the nation.

Some of the revenues have simply moved elsewhere (to streaming services, say), but there is a lot of free listening. The gap between what a consumer pays and the value he or she receives from the purchase is called “consumer surplus,” and the growing prevalence of zero-priced goods and services online seems to be increasing consumer surplus.14

two entertainers got together to create a 90-minute television special. They had no experience writing for the medium and quickly ran out of material, so they shifted their concept to a half-hour weekly show. When they submitted their script, most of the network executives didn’t like it or didn’t get it. One of the actors involved in the program described it as a “glorious mess.” After filming the pilot, it was time for an audience test. The one hundred viewers who were assembled in Los Angeles to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the show dismissed it as a dismal failure. One put it bluntly: “He’s just a loser, who’d want to watch this guy?” After about six hundred additional people were shown the pilot in four different cities, the summary report concluded: “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.” The performance was rated weak. The pilot episode squeaked onto the airwaves, and as expected, it wasn’t a hit. Between that and the negative audience tests, the show should have been toast. But one executive campaigned to have four more episodes made. They didn’t go live until nearly a year after the pilot, and again, they failed to gain a devoted following. With the clock winding down, the network ordered half a season as replacement for a canceled show, but by then one of the writers was ready to walk away: he didn’t have any more ideas. It’s a good thing he changed his mind. Over the next decade, the show dominated the Nielsen ratings and brought in over $1 billion in revenues. It became the most popular TV series in America, and TV Guide named it the greatest program of all time. If you’ve ever complained about a close talker, accused a partygoer of double-dipping a chip, uttered the disclaimer “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” or rejected someone by saying “No soup for you,” you’re using phrases coined on the show. Why did network executives have so little faith in Seinfeld? When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we’d all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for new ventures and products, 87 percent were completely unique. Our companies, communities, and countries don’t necessarily suffer from a shortage of novel ideas. They’re constrained by a shortage of people who excel at choosing the right novel ideas. The Segway was a false positive: it was forecast as a hit but turned out to be a miss. Seinfeld was a false negative: it was expected to fail but ultimately flourished.

A focus on top line revenues tends to be great for stakeholders such as employees, suppliers and bankers, but rarely for minority shareholders. Sticking to what you’re good at is often a good tenet.

Chris Argyris, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, wrote a lovely article in 1977,191 in which he looked at the performance of Harvard Business School graduates ten years after graduation. By and large, they got stuck in middle management, when they had all hoped to become CEOs and captains of industry. What happened? Argyris found that when they inevitably hit a roadblock, their ability to learn collapsed: What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.… Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.… [T]hey become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.192 [italics mine] A year or two after Wave, Jeff Huber was running our Ads engineering team. He had a policy that any notable bug or mistake would be discussed at his team meeting in a “What did we learn?” session. He wanted to make sure that bad news was shared as openly as good news, so that he and his leaders were never blind to what was really happening and to reinforce the importance of learning from mistakes. In one session, a mortified engineer confessed, “Jeff, I screwed up a line of code and it cost us a million dollars in revenue.” After leading the team through the postmortem and fixes, Jeff concluded, “Did we get more than a million dollars in learning out of this?” “Yes.” “Then get back to work.”193 And it works in other settings too. A Bay Area public school, the Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, takes this approach to middle school math. If a child misses a question on a math test, they can try the question again for half credit. As their principal, Wanny Hersey, told me, “These are smart kids, but in life they are going to hit walls once in a while. It’s vital they master geometry, algebra one, and algebra two, but it’s just as important that they respond to failure by trying again instead of giving up.” In the 2012–2013 academic year, Bullis was the third-highest-ranked middle school in California.194

Fastscaling means that you’re willing to sacrifice efficiency for the sake of increasing your growth rate. However, because fastscaling takes place in an environment of certainty, the costs are well understood and predictable. Fastscaling is a good strategy for gaining market share or trying to achieve revenue milestones.

All charities would disappear from earth once the governments start taxing the rich 90% of their income and investing that revenue in public essentials – such as, groceries, housing, healthcare and education.

No, no, no,” replied Brynjolfsson. “From about the 1930s through about the 1960s, the [top] tax rate averaged about seventy percent. At times it was up at ninety-five percent. And those were actually pretty good years for growth.” Indeed they were. Between 1948 and 1973, real GDP grew 170 percent in the United States and per capita income nearly doubled. During that same period, the revenue collected through that progressive tax code made it possible to build an interstate highway system and fund the space program, while dramatically expanding the social safety net, with new programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and food stamps. Even with historically high tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, the period of economic expansion came to be viewed as a golden age of capitalism. And with government largely delivering for people in a way they had not seen before, these years were also not coincidentally an age that saw Americans two to three times more likely to express trust in their government than they have in more recent years.

A good metric changes the way you behave. This is by far the most important criterion for a metric: what will you do differently based on changes in the metric? Drawing a line in the sand is a great way to enforce a disciplined approach. A good metric changes the way you behave precisely because it’s aligned to your goals of keeping users, encouraging word of mouth, acquiring customers efficiently, or generating revenue. Unfortunately, that’s not always how it happens. At one company, Alistair saw a sales executive tie quarterly compensation to the number of deals in the pipeline, rather than to the number of deals closed, or to margin on those sales. Salespeople are coin-operated, so they did what they always do: they followed the money. In this case, that meant a glut of junk leads that took two quarters to clean out of the pipeline—time that would have been far better spent closing qualified prospects. Of course, customer satisfaction or pipeline flow is vital to a successful business. But if you want to change behavior, your metric must be tied to the behavioral change you want. If you measure something and it’s not attached to a goal, in turn changing your behavior, you’re wasting your time. Worse, you may be lying to yourself and fooling yourself into believing that everything is OK. That’s no way to succeed.

But the most engaging part of the planning process should be having people figure out how they’ll achieve their OKRs. OKRs have to be aggressive enough so that people don’t quite know how to reach them at the start of the journey. Even if they have an idea of what they should do, there must be a chance of the OKR not being hit. For example, let’s say your company needs to grow 25% in revenues in a given quarter. How the company will hit that goal is going to be a matter of great thinking and creativity. The journey starts with analyzing the data to understand pockets of opportunity. Where can the sales process be improved? Where is there breakage in the sales process? Where are the low hanging fruits? Let’s say this analysis shows that salespeople have too few leads and therefore need more leads to work on. You then calculate that at your recent-past conversion rates, you’d need to grow leads by 100% in order to grow sales by 25%. That’s the first hypothesis. So you unfold a “grow the number of leads” Objective to marketing and a Key Result of “generate 15,000 more inbound leads quarter-on-quarter.” Of course, there’s a chance that growing leads won’t result in more sales. Getting it right is good management and good thinking.

When a company is growing it is more likely to acknowledge the importance of its vendors and suppliers and treat them fairly. In return, its suppliers frequently become trusted partners in uncovering new business opportunities. When a company is constantly changing and its revenues and profits are growing you’ll generally find a more engaged group of vendors and suppliers who are interested in truly being good business partners

This obsession with measuring and optimizing productivity is not new. In the thirteenth century, Venetian merchants carefully calculated the difference between the costs of the sailing voyages they underwrote and the revenues they ultimately earned from the goods sold, one of the first iterations of the Return on Investment calculation (ROI). This practice gave birth to the double bill accounting system and the “Equity - Assets = Liability” equation that’s still used today to determine the profitability of a business.