The Illusion of Profit………

There is an award winning radio program called This American Life that acts as a social mirror by broadcasting stories of everyday people. On January 14, 2011, there was an episode of the radio program titled Climate Changes. People Don’t. The broadcast dealt with the issue education under the strains of cultural bias and belief systems.

A fourteen year old named Erin Gustafson from Virginia listens to evidence presented by Dr. Roberta Johnson. Dr. Johnson is the Executive Director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, she helps develop curricula on climate change. Dr. Johnson presents the latest scientific information available in an attempt to educate someone who has a very strong belief about the topic. Though Erin admits the evidence is strong, the influence of her belief system overcomes the cognitive dissonance by rationalizing the information is false.

This story touched me. For the last twenty five years, teaching has been a very big part of my life. I teach in a business program at a large university. Though I am not a PhD, I offer courses that blend academic and professional insight. I have been known for many years as the classroom preacher. In fact, “profit is a metric, not a mission” has been my mantra for more than 15 years. Even after listening to me for an entire quarter, many of my bright young students will try to manage profits.

To understand why students will listen to very powerful evidence and logic and then ignore it; I thought it was important to take the time to learn more about the behavior of people. Over the course of a decade I looked at psychology, personality and temperament and I learned that it is pretty generally accepted that we all have challenges when it comes to our perspectives.

Through a quirk of nature and no fault of their own, some of us tend to see the world through very narrow, but deep lenses. This is due to a cognitive ability to see the world as an assembly of properties or details. To an outside observer, it seems that some of us need to isolate or silo parts of our world in order to comprehend it. Individuals with this ability comprehend the world around them by analyzing to details of objects. When they see bottled water, they see a container made of plastic, not the ability to quench a thirst.

Though this depth of their perspective blesses them with the ability to see great rich detail, their brain is limited in what it can process and thus it will establish filters and sacrifice the natural ability to see relationships. The result is that they have a perspective that sees what is happening at that moment, in isolation, removed from all else. They are unable to make connections to what has happened in the past or what will likely happen tomorrow. Because their perspective is framed by a narrow band of time, which creates an illusion that what happens today is unrelated to what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow.

More than seventy percent of the population has stronger tendencies for data and detail. For that part of the population with the natural give of detailed analysis, profit is a point of data; a measure of now is the perfect guide. For many, the relationship between profit and customer satisfaction is either not important or not recognized. So, through the process of rationalizing, they disregard the notion that value is created by workers for customers; and instead they establish a system of belief structured around the notion that managers create value by cutting costs.

In the process, I did discover that my students did learn well, they do understand that profit is a metric, not a mission. However, in their minds, meeting the metric is what gets rewarded, not fulfilling the mission.