Cash flow Quote by Ed Catmull

““A management team brought in by George to restructure Lucasfilm seemed concerned mostly with cash flow, and as time went on, they became openly skeptical that our division would ever attract a buyer. This team was headed by two men with the same first name, whom Alvy and I nicknamed “the Dweebs” because they didn’t understand a thing about the business we were in. Those two guys threw around management consulting terms (they loved to tout their “corporate intuition” and constantly urged us to make “strategic alliances”), but they didn’t seem at all insightful about how to make us attractive to buyers or about which buyers to pursue. At one point, they called us into an office, sat us down, and said that to cut costs, we should lay off all our employees until after our division was sold—at which point we could discuss rehiring them. In addition to the emotional toll we knew this would take, what bugged us about this suggestion was that our real selling point—the thing that had attracted potential suitors thus far—was the talent we’d gathered. Without that, we had nothing. So, when our two like-minded overlords demanded a list of names of people to lay off, Alvy and I gave them two: his and mine.””

— Ed Catmull