Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart.

Adams’s line satirizes how basic business truisms can be repackaged as “insight” in corporate settings. By pointing to a definition most people already know—profit equals revenue minus expenses—the speaker can appear analytically sharp without offering any real strategy. The humor depends on the mismatch between the simplicity of the statement and the social reward it supposedly earns, poking fun at managerial culture, buzzword-laden meetings, and the performance of expertise. Implicitly, it also critiques audiences who mistake confident restatement of fundamentals for leadership or intelligence, suggesting that status in organizations can hinge as much on presentation as on substance.