Word: yardsticks
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When is a company well managed? At one time, the profit sheet at the end of the year was the only yardstick. But well-managed companies no longer take such a short view. Now, the profit picture is projected over a period of years. Frequently a well-managed company will sacrifice short-range profits and dividends for long-range gains. e.g., Du Pont spent $27 million before it had nylon ready for commercial production. Moreover, shrewd managers do not become complacent even when their profits, year after year, are large. The test is whether the company's profits...
Miami's McGregor Smith, president of Florida Power & Light Co., has one yardstick of the area's growth−and his faith in the future. In the last ten years Smith, who has done as much as any man to lure new industries to Florida, has spent $151 million on expansion, more than doubled the company's capacity to 503,000 kilowatts. In the next ten years, for another $332 million, he expects to triple capacity...
Measured by the city slicker yardstick, farmers' Cadillacs are getting longer each year. No doubt a number of men in farming, as in all industries, prospered in the years following the war. But sobering statistics show that even in good times the average farmer earns less than a dollar an hour, including the food he grows for his family. Even so, farmers are concerned not so much with increasing their slice of the economic pie as insuring that they get it every year...
...read with scriptural attention on Broadway, even though the majority feel "our responsibility is not to the theater but to the public." Says Chapman: "I write for an audience of one-a tough one: me." Atkinson, Kerr and the Post's Richard Watts have a similar "personal" yardstick. The Mirror's Robert Coleman ("My readers consider me a ... shopper for them"), the Journal-American's John McClain ("My duty is to tell my readers whether or not a show is worth the price of a ticket") and the World-Telegram and Sun's William Hawkins...
There are some brave souls who attempt to define recession in specific terms. The results are just as baffling. To retailers, a recession is a drop in sales, but they will differ as to whether it is a 5% or a 20% drop. To manufacturers, industrial production is the yardstick; to labor leaders, unemployment; to Wall Streeters, stock prices...