I gave a number of talks last year and wrote some articles for MINING ENGINEERING about the changes that were happening at SME. I used the term "Reinventing SME" to capture the magnitude of the changes we were undertaking. These were not just ordinary changes we were making to our Society. This was a total renaissance of the organization. If you have kept up with what we have been doing to reinvent SME, skip to the last few paragraphs. If you need an update on why we are making such significant changes, read on. The Financial Performance graph shows SME's operating performance plus investment income (Fig. 1). For reference, SME has not seen a surplus from its operations since 1995. Our board of directors (me included) got into the bad habit of budgeting for operating losses and then relying on SME's investment income to make up the difference. The surpluses in the late 1990s were associated with the performance of SME's investment portfolio in the stock market. And, during the same time frame, we were budgeting an approximate operating loss of 300,000 dollars annually. But we all remember what happened to the stock market in the early 2000s. So you can see that our operations plus investments looked pretty stark coming into the 21st century.
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