The bottom line

I’m struck by the constant rejection of, or even outright disdain for, any implication that financial or economic thinking is anything other than Devil worship, countered to the pure good of public service or simple love for a profession. Since when did “business” become a dirty word? We still value ingenuity, productivity and development.

In fact, my experiences — and I’m sure those of many others — have shown the opposite of this fear of business sentiment to be valid. The summer after my freshman year I interned in a congressional office in D.C. in an unpaid position. It was in the office of my local congressman and I genuinely support his beliefs regarding the role and operations of Congress, if not most of his political stances. Yet, despite these distinct connections to his work, I was stuck with a depressing sense of disappointment as I left the office each day.

The problem was that my office never took advantage of my presence. I answered phone calls here and there and at times sorted mail — these were the only productive services I contributed to the office. Otherwise, I read. Never have I been so well-versed in every single news story to hit anything from The Financial Times to the “Weird News” section of The Huffington Post. My office had for a number of years running been deemed to operate the best intern program on the Hill, a status they achieved through a feature called “intern time,” in which interns met daily with the congressman. Having experienced it, though, I would hardly boast so much.

This summer, I took an entirely different route and got myself a paid internship with a financial analysis firm in New York. The firm works exclusively for government entities and municipalities, so there was still an aspect of public sector involvement, but I was undoubtedly working in the private sector and getting paid to do so. The difference between my two summers was like night and day. I rarely had a moment of unused time in my hours at the office. Again some of my tasks were administrative in nature. However, instead of completing tasks that required no thought or skill, when I was asked to perform routine data entry I was also to double check the accuracy of the information. I saw and felt my utility in the office every day.

While some part of me is pained to admit it, I attribute this difference to the fact that this firm, unlike the congressional office, had real money on the table. They had already committed to paying me for the hours I would be at the office, and so, accordingly, they found ways to make every single hour productive to their goal, to maximize the benefit against their now fixed cost of my summer employment (I was paid a lump sum, not hourly).

Now, this admission doesn’t pain me because I sympathize with the ever-present idea that running any organization like a business is a bad idea — in fact, I hold quite the opposite view. This pains me because an office that should have been motivated to adopt the most efficient and effective practices was operating with complete disregard for either.

The congressional office’s bottom line wasn’t, and perhaps needn’t be, monetary efficiency, but surely some form of bureaucratic efficiency or managerial streamlining would have been to their benefit. I could have done any number of tasks that would have increased the staffers’ ability to do their jobs efficiently, and yet, I sat unused, casually flipping through obituaries to stave off boredom.

Such an anti-business-like-operating attitude springs up in reform arguments all the time. As a result of the current societal attitude toward business in general, many are quick to reject any proposal that an entity not specifically labeled as “firm” or “business” behaves with any operational similarity. A friend in Students for Education Reform noted that many individuals scoff at the idea that a school would operate with a business-like bottom line.

But the problem is a misconception that the “bottom line” must always be profit driven. Sure, in the strict sense of the phrase’s derivation, profit is implied, but it has developed a more idiomatic meaning in day-to-day usage and should be recognized as a useful concept without implications of “soullessness.” A bottom line could, as in the above example, just as easily be student success. It ought to communicate a sense of “goals we are trying to achieve” or “metrics we are trying to maximize.”

Perhaps I’m biased (I am in the economics department), but isn’t that exactly how we want any organization, for- or not-for-profit alike, to operate? To define a goal and a metric for measuring that goal and then to work in a way that best achieves that? I’ll admit I’ve always had an affinity for dirty words, but the vulgarity of “business” is lost on me. At Princeton, we toss around the word “tool” all the time — a word I’ve never heard used in a context not meant to degrade the work or achievement that someone certainly invested time and effort in — but throw out the b-word, and you may as well descend directly to the fiery pits.

Lily Alberts is an economics major from Nashville, Tenn. She can be reached at lalberts@princeton.edu.