John S McClenahen retired from IndustryWeek in 2006

The Myth of Profit or Loss

April 29, 2013
  Such mutually-exclusive terms—profit or loss, and asset or liability—do not even begin to accurately describe the spectrum of elements that are manufacturing today, asserts John S. McClenahen, former IndustryWeek editor.

We all do it. We characterize some person as good or bad. Or some action as right or wrong. We speak of guilt or innocence. We are prone to demand “just a simple yes or no.”

In U.S. manufacturing, such “either/or” thinking, aided and abetted by generally accepted accounting principles, encourages managers to categorize virtually everything as an asset or a liability and focuses their attention on the bottom line of profit or loss.

Yet false-choice thinking and false-choice principles do not reflect the reality of manufacturing—in a production plant or across a company. Rather, manufacturing today is, well, more like the spectrum of American politics. Manufacturing embraces not only the functional equivalents of Republicans and Democrats, but also of Independents, Tea Partyers, Libertarians, Conservatives, Liberals, and Greens—to name a few. Manufacturing, like American politics, is a dynamic mix.

Think about investment in R&D. An asset? Or a liability? In reality, research and development touches almost everything manufacturers do—from making goods to providing services to designing effective supply chains to determining customer satisfaction. Best managed manufacturers and manufacturing facilities invest in products, processes, and people. They seek out and adapt promising research. They develop better processes. They implement best practices. They encourage continuous personal improvement through classroom and on-the-job training, including the cross-training of production people. They empower workers with responsibility for scheduling production, making safety and compliance decisions, and sharing in quality assurance. They accept short-term costs for the probability of long-term gains. They accept short-term losses for the promise of longer-term profit.

What’s more, manufacturing’s best-managed companies also recognize that all their activities exist in a dynamic economic and political environment, and that executives, managers, and other employees will sometimes have to react to developments not of their own making, events they did not anticipate, or decisions with which they do not necessarily agree.

Simplistic and misleading labeling has done a dramatic disservice to understanding the complex realities—and contradictions—of American politics. Think “Red” or “Blue.” Similarly, such mutually-exclusive terms—profit or loss, and asset or liability—do not even begin to accurately describe the spectrum of elements that are manufacturing today.

To be sure, some managers at some of the manufacturing plants judged to be North America’s best by IW during the past five years zero in on profit as the number one indicator of performance—of their facility’s success or failure. Significantly, however, many other managers at many other plants embrace multiples of indicators ranging from cash flow and customer experience to value and yield as top measures of performance. Profit (or loss) is only one of as many as 77 mutually inclusive measures.

This is another of a series of occasional essays by John S. McClenahen, who retired from IndustryWeek in 2006 and remains an interested observer of global manufacturing.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

 John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
      
      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
      
      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
      
      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
      
      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
      
      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
      

 

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