we're going to psyche them out

In Greg Lawrence's book, Jackie as Editor, various folks the author interviewed discuss changes in the publishing business which took place in the late 1980s - early 90s.

Cost-cutting methods
and
profit-maximizing methods

at one publishing company which was bought by a German company are described ...
("More pr-r-r-ofits now!"...
[Vee haff vays of mekk-ing you talk!"])

The part that stayed in my mind & puzzled me somewhat was where it said that in the

earlier incarnation, the way of doing business as a publisher was -- you can make bigger money on some types of books, and then smaller amounts of money on books you publish that have a little more esoteric appeal, not so much mass popularity, but it's still important to publish those, too, for -- like --

A.  the good of mankind,
B.  status and prestige of the publishing company, and
C.  future opportunities if the author of that "little" book becomes better known.

The company's PROFIT would be the overall results (profit-and-loss results) (and -- cost / benefit analysis, right?) of all the various sectors, and the different books they published, put together, and then calculated and analyzed.

-----------But then after the co. was sold to the conglomerate, one of the things that changed was that Profitability Analysis was then applied in the same way to

every book that was proposed. 

Making it more and more difficult to ever bring out a book that was about something that wasn't already hugely popular.  (So much for pioneering new ideas....)

[How much Money can each book possibly gr-rind in here...?]  And not looking at other aspects....

Instead of each book and sector making its own contributions which add up to a whole, it would be like each product (book) is supposed to yield similar profit-results as every other one.
(Why?)
(Because they say so.)

It sounds weird, to me, because if, with every business, they tried to run it that way, nothing would ever survive -- Oh, we didn't make a profit on Monday, so we won't work any more Mondays, only Tuesdays through Fridays.
Reason why?
Well, Mondays aren't profitable.
(See?  See those numbers?)

It's short-term thinking, being held up, not as something to avoid, but rather something to emulate.

It kind of sounds like Enron and then some of those other companies -- I asked somebody who understands accounting, once, What did they do?  And he said, they arranged the numbers so that the near-term quarter would look good.

Instead of actually doing the real work, making an actual profit, for the year, and then writing that down, for-real, on a real piece of paper.  Numbers which would not need to be arranged, but could just be written down, regular, reflecting actual profit.  Or loss, as the case may be.  (Like -- "Last year the losses were $----.  This year the losses, as you can see, were only $---.  The year after next we will begin to make a profit, and build from there.  The numbers support this projection, as you can see"....etc. etc.)

But instead of doing that, some "executives" found that it was more profitable for themselves (not the companies) to make it "look good" for the quarter, and then bail, or -- "skip town" ...

Since Enron the news has been full of such schemes and scams, from global to local, & in between.  (Is it Monkey see, Monkey do?)  And if one gets away with it, another one can, too.  Who has been allowing this?

-------------------------------
The kind of books that Jackie Onassis liked to publish were, many times, the ones that some cynic would say, "That's going to sell about three copies," right after she got finished saying, "These are subjects that people should care about."

So when the "business" m.o. changed after the co. she worked for sold, she might have felt very discouraged -- however, what she did was develop strategies.  According to several different JBKO biographers, she would make plans ahead of time for selling her proposed acquisitions in meetings with the bean-counters:  she would prepare, with a colleague, telling the person, "We're going to psyche them out."

------------ I really like that, somehow.

To make good stuff happen -- two quotes to remember --

Kurt Vonnegut - "The triumph over anything is a matter of organization."

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - "We're going to psyche them out."

-30-