002-The Back Story of My Theory, PPC

Before I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in Economics for about a year, I worked as an intern at a Japanese Accounting firm.

Wow! It has been a long time. I chose to work in a Japanese company because not only do I like to learn about the working experience there but also, the most important thing, to adapt to the working culture of “Hard Working”.

Speaking of Hard Working, I believe you would agree that Japanese workers are representatives. They work long hours and some of my colleagues even bring sleeping bags, toothbrushes, and toothpaste to work. They are willing and always ready to work overnight. I am not saying to work overnight occasionally. I mean six days a week. They work on Sunday also but for 8 hours. This is a normal situation during Tax season when I was there on an internship.

I was not that hard-working, but I did have some experiences where I worked so late that the parking lot was locked and I had to call my friend to drive me home.

As an intern, I earned a low flat-rate salary. All interns were getting the same offer. Because of the difference in ability, knowledge, and computer skill of each intern, and we all were under the same compensation, I questioned how our salary was determined and what is the best way to determine it. After a while of thinking, I developed the early stage of my theory, the Potential Performance Curve. I spent ten more years observing the real world to get enough case studies to support my theory. Surprisingly, the theory did provide an explanation of so many real phenomena.

You may learn the basic concept of the theory of the Potential Performance Curve in the topic of Lazy. No Judge! It is Economics!

In that topic, John and Peter, eventually, will work and bring only $5 per hour to the restaurant, and the restaurant will not earn any profit by hiring them. How does the restaurant earn for living then?

If John and Peter could have a raise in the second year of their employment, what should their wages be then? How to determine the wage of all of us? What does the raise bring to the restaurant? How about promotion? You will find a lot of follow-up questions just based on a very simple example.

The topic today is only talking about how I bring up the theory of PPC, I will write more topics to cover those questions with this PPC theory in the future.