Contribuição

"When you run a company, it’s obviously important to understand how profitable the business is. Many leaders look at profit margin, which measures the total amount by which revenue from sales exceeds costs. But if you want to understand how a specific product contributes to the company’s profit, you need to look at contribution margin."

"Contribution margin". A primeira vez que li sobre esse conceito foi com Peter Drucker, talvez no livro "Managing For Results". Pensamento que me fez chegar a "Managing for Business Effectiveness":

"What is the first duty—and the continuing responsibility—of the business manager? To strive for the best possible economic results from the resources currently employed or available.
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1. What is the manager’s job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite—and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to “problems” rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.
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2. What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Yet our tools—especially our accounting concepts and data—all focus on efficiency. What we need is (1) a way to identify the areas of effectiveness (of possible significant results), and (2) a method for concentrating on them.
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1. Economic results require that managers concentrate their efforts on the smallest number of products, product lines, services, customers, markets, distribution channels, end uses, and so on which will produce the largest amount of revenue. Managers must minimize the attention devoted to products which produce primarily costs, because their volume is too small or too splintered.
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2. Economic results require also that staff efforts be concentrated on the very few activities that are capable of producing truly significant business results—with as little staff work and staff effort as possible spent on the others."

Uma grande coincidência desta semana que passou foi auditar uma empresa em que este tema está na ordem do dia, ainda que sem o saberem.

Drucker, o homem que mudou a minha vida.

Trecho inicial retirado de "Contribution Margin: What It Is, How to Calculate It, and Why You Need It"

Agora estou na dúvida... talvez tenha sido o Engº Vergílio Folhadela quem primeiro me deu a conhecer a contribuição.