What if Marriott operated without any revenue, room-rate or other meaningful customer-usage data from its individual hotels? Suppose it remitted money to cover salaries and other expenses, without knowing if any of it was producing a product for which customers were willing to pay. Imagine further that Marriott asked only for self-graded quarterly "report cards" from its managers, and that, as its only act of supervision, it simply audited its hotels' expenditures.
You don't need to run a Fortune 500 company to know how quickly such a system would run amok. Absent accountability, managers and staff would have no incentive to provide a reasonable service. They'd have to be somewhat honorable to even bother showing up to work. In short order we'd find employees buying $10,000 worth of furniture for $20,000 and splitting the difference with the vendor. Come audit time: $20,000 expense item, $20,000 vendor receipt, "check and check, all looks clean here."
If you think that no business would operate this way, then you're evidently not familiar with the "business" of international aid. International nongovernment organizations get their funding from governments and other donors, not the men, women and children they are supposed to be serving. Without revenue or other quality customer-satisfaction metrics, NGO executives and donors have no way of measuring whether employees on the ground are providing a product of value to their impoverished "customers."
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