I’m thrilled for them, but it shouldn’t take the sale of your business to motivate you to optimize your pricing, eliminate waste, re-allocate expenditures towards the most productive investments, and improve your profitability.  The more profitable your business, the more you can invest in growth, the more you can attract and reward superb employees, and the more cash you can take home.  The most profitable companies are also the best-run, and the best ones to work for.

What are you waiting for?

Some companies create burdensome regimes of rules and contracts to control every possible risk and contingency.  They leave their employees no discretion, create a culture of inflexibility and bureaucracy, and slow the whole organization down.  Unfortunately for them, business is a realm where superior judgment and personal relationships, and not faux-deterministic legalities, are what create winning companies.

Sign fewer contracts.  Create fewer inflexible rules.  Dismantle bureaucracy.  Empower and encourage your people to use their judgment to build profitable relationships that grow and improve your company.  Do so, and you’ll make far more money than you ever will by kowtowing to your lawyers.

Many companies think they’ve already eliminated the waste, but in truth they’re still leaving enormous amounts of money on the table.  Yes, they’ve had rounds of layoffs, and have cut some other obvious expenditures — but they are still chock full of all sorts of things that people spend money on that aren’t needed, or that could be purchased for considerably less in price or scope.

There is an equally long list of things that your people do that are worth less than the associated cost, because time really is money:  When you do fewer things, you need fewer people, or can assign more people to growth-producing activities.

Stop hoping the economy will recover sooner than it will.  Instead, find the 10% (at least) of everything you’re spending and doing that provides no value to your customers, and use that money to grow, to shore up your profits, or both.  If you do so with more urgency than your competitors, you can re-gain control of your own fate and stop worrying about the economy.

More recently I’ve come to understand that good teachers object not to being measured, but to poorly designed measurement systems.  So I was pleased to hear an expert predict that the over-reliance on standardized tests and other numeric measures will fade over time, and that in fact it is already being de-emphasized in some places.  In its place, principals are being allowed more discretion to rate teachers based on their own judgment and experience.

This clearly is the right answer, albeit an imperfect one.   Leadership is all about making judgments, including judgments about people, that are only partially backed by data, and often not a whole lot of data.  To those who object that such judgments can be political or unfair, the answer is that of course they can, but we live in the real world.  As Churchill said about democracy, if meritocracy by subjective judgment is a flawed way to manage people, then it is less flawed than all the other ways.

This also means, by extension, that supervisors will have to up their game in selecting principals.  But the stakes are high, and the effort is well worth it.  And it’s worth it in your business, too.

You don’t need to be supremely charismatic, or great with one-liners, to be a strong and valuable leader.  What you do need is:

• Solid and compelling business logic behind what you’re trying to do

• Candor and honesty

• Open, frequent, unambiguous and consistent communication

• The willingness to be make difficult decisions and to be selective — about investments, and about people

• The resolve to stick to these principles in the face of myriad, never-ending opportunities to be de-railed

The good news is that many more people can achieve this list than can develop extraordinary charm or charisma.  And you can train yourself to do it.

Go for it.

Melky Cabrera of the San Francisco Giants was leading the league in batting this year until he was suspended when a drug test revealed that he had been using a banned performance-enhancing substance.  Unlike so many others who came before him who engaged in verbal or legal gymnastics to try to obfuscate the truth, he immediately ‘fessed up, apologized, and promised to learn from the experience once his suspension was over.  This week he went even further and asked the Commissioner of Baseball to void his looming batting championship and award it to someone else, reflecting that it would be unfair to claim the honor for himself.  The Commissioner reversed his own earlier ruling and agreed to Cabrera’s selfless request.

Some have speculated as to whether Cabrera is being sincere, or merely trying to salvage his image, but you know what? — it doesn’t matter.  An improvement in image that accrues because you’ve done the right thing is an improvement in image that is well earned.  Learn to admit when you’re wrong, and doing the right thing and advancing your own stature in the organization become seamlessly integrated, which is how it should be.

The paper’s readers have responded with protests, as they’ve failed to understand basic business economics.  If these protests were successful, they would in fact speed the paper’s demise.

Airline passengers act similarly when they complain about fees to change reservations, check bags, or eat snacks onboard.  They feel entitled to receive those services for free, even as airlines have teetered in and out of bankruptcy for decades.  In fact, Warren Buffett has argued that in the century since the Wright Brothers the commercial airline industry has yet to turn a cumulative profit.

When you’re in an industry where the prevailing sentiment among your customer base runs counter to the economic necessity to earn a reasonable profit, you’ve got a problem.  And the options you have to respond are limited.

You can try to change the prevailing sentiment, which is possible if you have a concentrated customer set, but extremely challenging if you sell to a mass market.

You can hope that you and your competitors will resist the pressure and keep prices where they need to be.  But as time goes on someone often blinks, prompting others to do the same and leaving you back where you started.

If neither of those approaches works, then you have to ask and answer fundamental questions about your business model, strategy, and future investments.  Can you change the model and strategy enough to re-orient your business away from the problem portion of the market?  Or is it time to harvest or sell the business?

I wish I could teach mass markets like the Times-Picayune’s that they have to allow their suppliers to be profitable, but I don’t know how.  The best I can do is encourage you, if you’re selling into such a market, to fully recognize what you’re up against, because the longer it takes you to face the truth the more it will cost you.  And as you contemplate new investments in products or markets, remember to first answer this question:  Will my customers let me make the profit I’m planning on?

So the price of bad communication is bad decision-making, and therefore bad results.  Fix it.

I’m sure you all want to run your companies more efficiently than the government.  How many positions, programs, and processes at your company were cost-justified when they were introduced but now are less relevant?  How many reports, meetings, and tasks do your employees tend to every day out of habit, and not based on any recent and rigorous analysis of their cost and benefit?

Now think of all the additional money you could spend wisely to go acquire new customers, or to find new and better ways to serve the customers you already have.

Which use of your money would produce more growth and profitability?

I’ve been inside more than one hundred companies, and I’ve yet to encounter one that can’t quickly and easily identify huge savings by asking tough questions about what is valuable and what isn’t.  When it the last time you did a thorough job of asking those questions — and how thorough were you really?

Don’t you have better things to do with your money?

The primary motivation of one of those super-heroes (the Black Widow) throughout the movie is to eliminate the “red on her ledger.”   Unlike her, none of us can wipe out a gang of bad guys while tied to a chair, but I do think we are well served to remember her guiding principle.

You’re constantly presented with opportunities to advance your career or company by manipulating and taking advantage of other people.  If you’re good at it and can put your conscience on hold you’ll find plenty of employees, customers and co-workers whom you can take advantage of in order to gain something at their expense.  You can beat some of them for years, and when they get wise and move on you’ll be able to find new victims.  The truth is that we’ve all acted this way more than once, and we’ve all enjoyed the profits than have resulted.

As your career advances, though, a different dynamic takes hold.  First of all, eventually the chickens come home to roost, and the cumulative stain to your reputation costs you more than the gain from the short-term wins.  And happily, the maturity and wisdom that most people acquire as they get older brings with it a change in perspective:  Finding the win-wins becomes much more gratifying than beating someone else.

When that happens you discover the incredible high that comes from applying whatever you’re best at to advancing the interests of others.  You develop a visceral distaste for being indebted to other people and the things they’ve done for you:  You become troubled by the red on your ledger.  As you go through your day and year eliminating that red you discover the unasked-for rewards:  You enjoy your work and life more, you sleep better, and your career and company thrive as others seek you out to return favors and do business with you.  The power of the person and leader you’ve become now outweighs the short-term gains you’ve decided to forgo – not only psychologically but financially.

If something doesn’t feel quite right about your tenure as a leader, it might just be because there’s too much red on your ledger.  And you don’t need to be able to take down some Russians while tied to a chair to do something about it.