Prometheus 6   

I'm just sayin'

Beating Expectations

Our hypercapitalist society likes to turn everything into a piece of financial news. Consider this past week. Intel, Howard Dean and "Kill Bill" all posted numbers that surpassed expectations. I.B.M., Joseph Lieberman and "Intolerable Cruelty" fell short.

Intel said it earned $1.7 billion last quarter, while Dr. Dean raised $14.8 million for his presidential campaign, far more than any other Democrat. "Kill Bill," the new Quentin Tarantino movie, grossed $22.7 million in its opening weekend.

Only recently have people been required to knowingly cite box office receipts to sound conversant with entertainment news. But money often seems the sole arbiter of credibility in our society.

Sports fans must also immerse themselves in financial detail. Plenty of football fans who pay scant attention to their finances know that teams are allowed to amortize a player's signing bonus over the life of his contract for salary cap purposes, but if the player is a bust, it all gets counted if and when he is cut. Ask a San Diego Chargers fan.

The key lesson to remember here is that figures alone do not matter. It's how they compare to expectations. What makes Senator Lieberman's $3.6 million haul last quarter seem meager is his high name recognition from 2000. I.B.M.'s earnings were solid, but just that. Likewise, the $62 million opening weekend box office this summer for "The Hulk" looked shabby only when compared with Hollywood's outsized expectations. Miramax wisely dampened expectations for Mr. Tarantino's film.

Sabotaging others' success by taking already high expectations and raising the bar a notch is an especially dodgy part of the expectations game. The only sour note to the Dean campaign's impressive fund-raising report, for instance, was that it fell short of what on Wall Street would be known as a "whisper number" of $15 million.

The bottom line? Everything has a bottom line, but if you play the game right, you can move it.