This is some aggressive consultant fluff. Few companies have such distinctive "profit" measures. If "the financial logic is rarely examined carefully" than maybe there's a reason, since analysis like this is mostly fantastical and brittle. This is the sort of argument that is both rational and implausible. A manager might use this logic to rationalize firing an engineering team (which is mostly why guys like this get hired) but they won't use it to manage an engineering team.