> So they set the budget as low as they could possibly get away with, and we 
> actually made a bit more money than that. Woo-friggin-hoo. What's gonna 
> happen next month, when we're not moving buildings and the budget is 
> expecting us to produce "real" numbers?

In my experience it is surprising how often you see quite senior people 
paying so much attention to figures like that that are just "noise" in the 
signal.  Draw a proper graph of profit over time, then make your conclusions 
based on the trend, not on some figure like "5.3% up on this time last 
year".

> For that matter, the top-management plan is to increase profits by 20%. I 
> have yet to hear anything about *how* this is supposed to happen. They've 
> muttered something about "oh, uh, yeah, we're going to hire more sales 
> staff". But so far, I've yet to see anybody hired.

Ditto here, when I first started the top guy told me how his plan was to 
double the sales figures over a 5 year period.  We're almost up to 5 years 
now and actually are sales have gone down because other companies have come 
in that are newer are more efficient than us.  He doesn't seem to care about 
taking time out to fix this (ie (re)training people and (re)organising 
stuff), just plodding on as we are trying to win more business.  He'll 
probably be forced to do something when it's way too late.

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