I was asked yesterday on what I would prioritize: Revenues or Costs? These type of question will always be answered by, "it depends" - the context is the clincher. In a summary, my answer was this:

You want to be effective when you want to capitalize on emerging or new opportunities. This happens when you need to get a foothold of the market before your competitors do. In this case, resources must be poured into capitalizing on the opportunity and revenues should be the primary metric. Obviously, there should be a healthy amount of internally or externally generated funds to finance this. If there are none, then management is dreaming.

On the other hand, you want to be efficient when you are already established in a mature industry and there is already healthy revenue growth. In this case, costs needs to be controlled and margins need to be protected or even optimized. COST here, should be the primary metric.

A business unit should be defined as either concentrating on EFFECTIVENESS or EFFICIENCY. It cannot do both at the same time. FOCUS is imperative to success.

The strategy and operating plan should be based on this fundamental choice.

Again, this is an exercise in stating the obvious... which is a MUST in management.