P³ — the Profit Prioritisation Perambulator

An interactive ternary board for the trade-off between quality, profit and people. Drag the marker, mark the moves a company has taken, and read where it stands.

Quality, profit and people share one budget: raise one and the others fall.

An independent tribute to the board Destin Sandlin built for Smarter Every Day. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced with Smarter Every Day or Destin Sandlin.

Questions

What is the Profit Prioritisation Perambulator?

A triangle with quality, profit and people at its corners. A marker inside it shows how a business splits its attention between the three. Because the three shares always add up to one, raising any of them lowers the others — priority is a budget, not a wishlist.

Where does the Perambulator come from?

Destin Sandlin built it on a whiteboard for an episode of Smarter Every Day about whether a product can still be manufactured in America competitively. He borrowed the name from the balancing device in Neal Stephenson's novel Seveneves. This site is an independent interactive version of that board.

What does the dashed triangle mean?

It is the edge of viability. Inside it the business survives; outside it the business has failed. Every priority needs at least about 12% of the budget, so failure is possible in every direction — maximising quality kills a company exactly as maximising profit does.

What is the profit crotch?

The wedge near the top of the viable region, where profit is squeezed as high as it can go without the business failing outright. It is the most stable bad place on the board: a company can sit there for years while quality and working conditions quietly rot, which is why so many products get worse over time.

Built by KPG Media, a creative studio in Hull, Yorkshire, making brand films, campaigns and social content for fashion, consumer and hospitality brands. See our work.