Revenue, cost, and risk.
These are the three goods of business — the three and only three reasons for expending money, effort and attention.
To increase revenue, companies either attract new customers or sell more to the customers it already has. As an alternative, some companies acquire another company to buy its revenue … usually for more than it’s worth.
Imagine you’re no longer responsible for keeping your company’s computers up and running. Instead, you’re an epidemiologist. Rather than a new and very aggressive malware threat you read about a new and highly contagious virus … the statistics indicate 30% of those exposed become infected and roughly 1.25% of those infected die.
The U.S. has a population of 300 million. You do the arithmetic: Straight-line extrapolation predicts 90 million infections and more than a million deaths.
Welcome to the world of the adults who are responsible for responding to the “Novel H1N1” flu virus.
