Sublime

When Jason asked why they kept these clients, Meghan said it was simple: the clients paid them $500 a month each. It wasn’t a lot, but every little bit helped. Jason pointed out that now that he was their accountant, they had to accept a rule: any client who is invoiced for $500 should be cut off. It cost Meghan and Rebecca more in effort and

Is he irreplaceable? Is he the Steve Jobs of JPMorgan Chase?

of the firm’s entire productive capacity, 40 or 50 percent is consumed with a higher-priced person performing a lower-value task.

In their effort to become more like banks, businesses cannibalized themselves, liquidating any divisions that were on the ground actually creating value.

“Profit-Based Management Environment” in which one of those ideas was to make sure that the promises that client-facing people (sales) made were always “delayed, centralized, and remote.”

The great management consultant Peter Drucker once wrote that profits were not the rationale of business decisions, but rather the test of their efficacy.32 What Drucker meant was that if a company does its job well, delivering goods or services to customers at competitive prices, then profits should be forthcoming. From the early 1980s onwards,