Our greatest expense

I keep up on a blog by former employees of the search engine Google and recently, one of the Xooglers recounted a meeting in which Sergey (one of the co-founders of the company) addressed a group of the employees…

Sergey once asked a large assemblage of Googlers what our greatest corporate expense was. “Health insurance!” was one answer shouted back. “Salaries!” “Servers!” “Taxes!” “Electricity!” “Charlie’s grocery bills!,” came back others. “No,” said Sergey. “Opportunity cost.” He explained that the products we weren’t launching and the deals we weren’t doing threatened our economic stability more than any single line item in the budget. It became a regular call and response at staff meetings and added to the sense that no matter how hard we were working, success was slipping through our fingers. Rather than cause employees to feel defeated, however, it became a rallying cry to redouble their efforts.



I found that insightful and wondered what the greatest expense is in the church.