Has been my experience that bean counters are only good at counting beans. That is fine as far as it goes. But turn off their spread sheets, they do not know squat about the businesses they are part of. They have no concept of the business model, customer relations, smoothness & efficiency of the operation, positive or negative consequences of their decision, etc, etc, etc. For example, I have seen a lg retail corporation pick out a new location, based only on the dollar amount of the location. Even if it is in a poor location for customers, difficult to deliver to, too small for operations, etc. When they could have picked a location just a short distance away, with none of those short comings, for just another 2 or 3 hundred a month.
When I was in the telephone industry, JIT was becoming all the rage. It was necessary that we maintain a certain amount of inventory of equipment & materials. Well, the counters wanted our local inventory reduced to zero. " You can order more when you need it ", but did not take into account how long it would take to get it. They acted like the factory was across the street. They did not take into account service outage when something "broke". Back then, in the telephone business, service was EVERYTHING ! Even though it was a monopoly at the time, they still worried about the Public Service Commission, and there was competition in the business world for intercompany switches, etc.
I tried to maintain inventory to take care of everyday useage, as well as be prepared for emergencies. Well, one of the counters was on me to get rid of stuff. So one day, we had an emergency. We had a local refinery, that was owned by a large oil company, a very BIG customer. The refinery had some construction going on, and a crane tore down some specialty cable, and tore out to special pole mounted switches. This caused the entire refinery to shut down. The bean counter came into my office, very worried, asking for the material. I told him sorry, but following his orders from two weeks ago, I had shipped that exact material out, and it was somewhere in the continental US. Yes, I could order more, but would probably take somewhere around 30 days to acquire. That would have cost the oil company millions of dollars. I told him that he could placate the oil company by telling them that his bean numbers looked good for the month, and the Pres of our company would be proud of him. He just looked like he was going to die. I knew I still had the stuff, but had to take the time to dig him a bit. He went back to his office. I called the warehouse and had them set the materials on a dock, then lined up a crew to pick up and go to the refinery to make the repairs.
When I left for the day, he was in his office, looking like he was seriously contemplating suicide, as he could see his career over, losing his pension, etc. I went in and told him it was OK. We had a conversation after which, he never, ever again bugged me about materials I kept in inventory. In fact, he never said another cross word to me.
Long story point being, he, like many bean counters, was being penny wise, and pound foolish. Never looking beyond for the unintended consequences, and preparing for same.
In terms of moving our production overseas. The useful idiots involved thought " yeah, we can save a nickel ". I think the big guys that orchestrated it knew, because short term they wanted the increase profit, but long term, they wanted to weaken the United States, and strengthen the commie countries that are playing them for fools !!
Sorry for such a long rant, but wanted to paint a fairly complete picture.
