Mr. Fayyad has made efforts to rationalize spending and to account for international aid, and discovered some $600 million in authority funds invested in about 79 commercial ventures for products including Canadian biopharmaceuticals to Algerian cellphones.
Even so, he said he could not rationalize spending close to $13,000 for a pair of Continental's BusinessFirst seats for himself and Julie Fisher, a vice president at the agency, to fly to Barcelona in November 2006 for a Leading Hotels of the World convention.
But studio bosses say their parent conglomerates are trying harder to rationalize spending, seeking a sweet spot: the least number of film releases that can keep enough profits pumping through their cable networks, theme parks, music and book publishers and other subsidiaries.
Companies have reduced costs, restructured, rationalized spending, and pushed people to work harder than ever.
It's harder to rationalize spending time, money, and resources on enhancing games that are no longer big sellers.
Like the rest of us, as a customer it can no longer rationalize spending huge amounts of money paying for a failed effort to deliver a package to a destination, but only for success.
Such cooperation would alleviate some of the conflicts involved when faced with the need to rationalize spending.
At least one customer is rationalizing the spending as the price of returning to innocence.
GSK's policy changes appear to be an important step in the direction of rationalizing commercial spending and refocusing brand messages on the underlying scientific and medical data that is critical for a physician to understand and prescribe responsibly.
This inward focus on "us" is reasonable given the order of sovereign states and the pressures imposed within states to rationalize "global" spending.
