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Notes -
Another explanation for this is the following: it's really hard for a CEO to maintain focus across an organization, and most can only do it with very simple messaging.
"This year is about growth!"
After several years of :arrowup: "This year is about good growth, we won't lose more than $X per new customer."
2022: "This year is about cash flow positivity/profitability/not dying."
I work at a company where I'm dead certain the CEO and many execs understand all this at a very quantitative level. Nevertheless, the actual messaging that reaches us regular workers is just the bullet point. And the net result is that the way it plays out, $1 from CEO bullet point > $1 from other method. If you're pushing "get $1 via careful cost cutting" in a growth year, your project isn't funded and if you do it yourself it doesn't look as good in a promo packet.
Net result is that me and my manager - two PhDs of Quantitative Subject on a Quantitatively Make Money Team - pick our projects based as much on alignment with CEO messaging as we do on an estimate of how much money we'd make. Or alternately, we do the same projects (make the growth vs ROA efficiency frontier move outward) but our summary slide reports a horizontal shift (more of profit per customer-ish metric) instead of a vertical one (more growth at the same profit per customer).
And everyone does this. A year ago at my work, Internal Bureaucracy Team saved some money by building a no-code app in AirCodaJiraForce instead of renting the relevant SAAS product. No one cared. Also a year ago, Engineering Platform Team picked a >$100k hosted SAAS product with cool visualizations over OSS Project that only renders tables. As far as I know no one has used any visualizations. Now the latter choice is being rethought mainly because messaging changed.
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