The Goal

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He shakes his head. "It'll have to be a bigger improvement than what you gave us in this past period."

"How big?"

"Just give me fifteen percent more on the bottom line than you did this month," he says.

I nod. "I think we can do that," I say-and note the split second of shock blink into Peach's face.

Then he says, "Fine. If you can deliver that, and keep deliv- ering it, we'll keep Bearington open."

I smile. If I do this for you, I'm thinking, you'd be an idiot to close us.

Peach stands, our chat concluded.

I fly the Mazda up the entrance ramp to the Interstate with the accelerator floored and the radio turned up loud. The adren- alin is pumping. The thoughts in my head are racing faster than the car.

Two months ago I figured I might be sending out my resume by now. But Peach just said if we turned in another good month he'd let the plant stay open. We're almost there. We just might be able to pull this off. Just one more month.

But fifteen percent?

We've been eating up our backlog of orders at a terrific rate. And by doing so we've been able to ship a tremendous volume of product-tremendous by any comparison: last month, last quar- ter, last year. It's given us a big surge of income, and it's looked fantastic on the books. But now that we've shipped all the overdues, and we're putting out new orders much faster than before...

The thought creeps up on me that I'm in really big trouble. Where the hell am I going to get the orders that will give me an extra fifteen percent?

Peach isn't just asking for another good month; he's de- manding an incredible month. He hasn't promised anything; I have-and probably too much. I'm trying to remember the or- ders scheduled for the coming weeks and attempting to calculate in my head if we're going to have the volume of business neces- sary for the bottom-line increase Peach wants to see. I have a scary feeling it won't be enough.

Okay, I can ship ahead of schedule. I can take the orders