How Do You Cut What You Don't Know?

[The current batch of Notes From The Cube may seem redundant, because The Cube is still sitting in annual Budget review meetings this week. If The Cube has to suffer through them, so does everyone else. Misery does not make us more charitable.]

So, we're being asked by the CEO and his CFO for an FYI on the YTD v PAB - and where we can make some cuts in order to up the PAR.

Sound Greek to you? 'Didn't sound much clearer to those of us in the room. Sadly, truly sadly, they speak in acronyms:
CEO - Chief Executive Officer
CFO - Chief Financial Officer
FYI - For Your Information
YTD - Year To Date
v - versus
PAB - Projected Annual Budget
PAR - Projected Annual Revenues

But, keeping with the Greek theme, the question that came up amongst all us Myrmidons of Manufacturing is fairly simple: How do we make budget cuts when we don't know what they want to do next year? (Read your Shakespeare to get the pun*)

Y'see, it works like this here and in all the world: The Emperor may want new clothes, but somewhere down the line there's a seamstress who has to cut the pattern --- and What pattern did His Excellency select?

We dunno and He's not telling.

Here's the thing: We make gadgets, not whizmos. So this budget is for gadgets. But some gadgets are part of whizmos, so we've made a few whizmo-oriented gadgets. And, to make those whizmo-system gadgets, we've hired a few whizmo engineers, and a few whizmo consultants, and made a few whizmo inventions --- because, really, whizmos are where the industry is going a few years down the road so that's where our future is.

Or so His Excellency has been telling us this past year as he laid off a whole shift of our gadget operations.

Howsoever, it seems, gadgets are relatively cheap to develop and make while whizmos are expensive. More than that: whizmos are the Future, not the Now, of income generation. To keep the cash flow a-flowin' we need gadgets a-goin'.

His Excellency decrees Budget Cuts.

"Your Highness," we ask, "What, in your Strategic Plan, do you want to cut: cheap gadgets or expensive whizmos?"

"We need to make Cuts," is the answer.

The seamstress crunches her scissors down between the lines: the Emperor's new clothes will be something between a shirt and a pair of pants.

[* Try Troilus and Cressida. Apropos, a question from left field: Cressida was the Trojan woman who was unfaithful to her warrior-lover Troilus. Why did they name a car "Cressida"? Speaking as a driver who has the typical love-hate relationship with mine automobile, this reference does not bode well for the affair.]