Comment by keybored

From the perspective of the business, you need to generate more money than your wage plus whatever else expenses that are associated with your employment. This surplus is what adds up to the profit.

Let’s just put the simplistic “be a profit center” thing at face value. The funny thing is that you can generate 10% surplus or 5X surplus. The difference in benefit to the company is large. But your benefit might not be much. Maybe a wage increase, maybe not. Maybe better job security.

Now others have already questioned the “profit center” line here. With so much alienation in the work force it becomes laughable to claim that you can point to a group of individuals as “the profit center” or “the cost center”. This reeks of political jockying. Is Sales the profit center? Without Sales nothing would be sold... but without Engineering there would be no product.

What ends up happening is that the people who insist the loudest are the ones who get promoted to Profit Center. Maybe.