"Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart"
About this Quote
Scott Adams lands the joke like a memo from the department of Obvious Truths: dress up a middle-school accounting definition as insider wisdom and you instantly gain status. The line works because it weaponizes a familiar workplace dynamic: in meetings, the person who states the simplest metric with confidence often gets credited with “clarity,” even if they’ve added no insight. Adams isn’t praising financial literacy so much as mocking the performative version of it.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s practical advice for sounding competent. Underneath, it’s an indictment of how competence gets socially manufactured in corporate settings. “Remind people” implies everyone already knows; the reminder is theater. “This makes you look smart” is the tell: the payoff isn’t better decisions, it’s reputation management. That’s classic Dilbert-world cynicism, where organizations confuse the appearance of rigor with rigor itself.
Context matters because Adams built a career satirizing the managerial class’s appetite for jargon, metrics, and pseudo-expertise. Profit, here, is the cleanest possible equation, the baseline reality that gets lost amid PowerPoints and strategy-speak. By choosing something so elementary, he highlights how low the bar can be for perceived intelligence when a room is anxious, hierarchical, or pretending the fundamentals are complicated.
The subtext is bleakly funny: if stating the obvious earns you credibility, the culture is broken. The real punchline isn’t accounting; it’s the corporate attention economy, where simplicity reads as genius because so much else is noise.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s practical advice for sounding competent. Underneath, it’s an indictment of how competence gets socially manufactured in corporate settings. “Remind people” implies everyone already knows; the reminder is theater. “This makes you look smart” is the tell: the payoff isn’t better decisions, it’s reputation management. That’s classic Dilbert-world cynicism, where organizations confuse the appearance of rigor with rigor itself.
Context matters because Adams built a career satirizing the managerial class’s appetite for jargon, metrics, and pseudo-expertise. Profit, here, is the cleanest possible equation, the baseline reality that gets lost amid PowerPoints and strategy-speak. By choosing something so elementary, he highlights how low the bar can be for perceived intelligence when a room is anxious, hierarchical, or pretending the fundamentals are complicated.
The subtext is bleakly funny: if stating the obvious earns you credibility, the culture is broken. The real punchline isn’t accounting; it’s the corporate attention economy, where simplicity reads as genius because so much else is noise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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