Too many companies these days can't tell the difference between good profits and bad.... By now you're probably wondering how in heaven's name profit, that holy grail of the business enterprise, can ever be bad. Short of outright fraud, isn't one dollar of earnings as good as another? Certainly, accountants can't tell the difference between good and bad profits. They all look the same on an income statement. While bad profits don't show up on the books, they are easy to recognize. They're profits earned at the expense of customer relationships.

If you wonder what getting and keeping the right employees has to do with getting and keeping the right customers, the answer is everything.

Too many companies these days can't tell the difference between good profits and bad.... By now you're probably wondering how in heaven's name profit, that holy grail of the business enterprise, can ever be bad. Short of outright fraud, isn't one dollar of earnings as good as another? Certainly, accountants can't tell the difference between good and bad profits. They all look the same on an income statement. While bad profits don't show up on the books, they are easy to recognize. They're profits earned at the expense of customer relationships.

Loyalty is dead, the experts proclaim, and the statistics seem to bear them out. On average, U.S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one. We seem to face a future in which the only business relationships will be opportunistic transactions between virtual strangers.