Our Least Important Asset
Why the Relentless Focus on Finance and Accounting is Bad for Business and Employees
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- USD 18.99
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- USD 18.99
Descripción editorial
A comprehensive and insightful look at the modern workplace and how employees are managed, where the new approach is driven by the quirks of financial accounting to the detriment of employees and the long-term success of the organization.
Real wages have stagnated or declined for most workers, job insecurity has increased, and retirement income is uncertain. Hours of work for white collar employees have increased steadily, opportunities for advancement have withered, and evidence of the negative effects of workplace stress on health continues to accumulate. Why have jobs gotten so much worse?
As Peter Cappelli argues, these issues are not a result of companies trying to be cost effective. They stem from the logic of financial accounting--the arbiter for determining whether a company is maximizing shareholder value--and its fundamental flaws in dealing with human capital. Financial accounting views employee costs as fixed costs that cannot be reduced and fails to account for the costs of bad employees and poor management. The simple goal of today's executives is to drive down employment costs, even if it raises costs elsewhere.
In Our Least Important Asset, Cappelli argues that the financial accounting problem explains many puzzling practices in contemporary management--employers' emphasis on costs per hire over the quality of hires, the replacement of regular employees with "leased" workers, the shift to unlimited vacations, and the transition of hiring responsibilities from professional recruiters to more expensive line managers. In the process, employers undercut all the evidence about what works to improve the quality, productivity, and creativity of workers. Drawing on decades of experience and research, Cappelli provides a comprehensive and insightful critique of the modern workplace where the gaps in financial accounting make things worse for everyone, from employees to investors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Misguided bean counting leads businesses to mistreat their workers to the detriment of profits, according to this incisive treatise. Wharton professor Cappelli (Why Good People Can't Get Jobs) pillories financial accounting rules set by the nonprofit Financial Accounting Standards Board that regard wages, benefits, and training as costs to be minimized, resulting in the undervaluation of employees. These perverse incentives, he explains, lead to outcomes that are bad for business, as when the costs of increased turnover outweigh nominal savings from layoffs and pay cuts, and when the outsourcing of labor to "reduce costs in the ‘employment' accounting category" ends up costing the same as employee wages would have. Cappelli also critiques the regime of managerial "optimization," noting that attempts to increase efficiency by monitoring employees' keystrokes, bathroom breaks, and communications require the expensive services of the data scientists who implement and oversee these systems. The shrewd analysis of how contradictory financial pressures stymie efforts to cut costs is buoyed by lucid, plainspoken prose ("This is why we keep hearing persistent complaints about skill shortages: it's because we stopped training"). The result is a timely study that connects present-day labor shortages to the dehumanizing irrationality of the modern workplace.
