The book war the authors already lost...

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

If the beancounter doesn't understand how the work of those he's auditing (or whose budget he's preparing) affects the organization, that's when he fails. (Or she. Intending to generalize, not be sexist.) And when the beancounters fail that's when the organization usually fails.

I've dealt with top level accounting types (to step away from the beancounters tag) and while they do have a "broader" view, is only broad in the sense that accounting touches the full organization but it is of necessity a mile wide and a millimeter deep because they simply have neither the time nor the preparation to fully understand line of business issues such as quality, brand building, customer loyalty, corporate memory, staff morale... Stuff that only the best line-of-business managers fully master.

When you look at everything through finance colored glasses, bodies become numbers, products become lego blocks, and quality a statistic. Big organizations need many skillsets but when the final word is solely quarterly financial statements, as evidenced with the NYC glass tower BPHs, the invariable result is the loss of core competencies either through outsourcing or through attrition as the more competent staff votes with their feet and leaves behind the less-experienced (and cheaper) staff.

Not all big companies fall prey to rule by beancounter, okay?
But the meme didn't come out of thin air: it is in fact very common among big mature companies and it generally requires strong ongoing effort by good CEOs to prevent it setting in, especially in tough economic times when the kneejerk reaction is to downsize the company into "financial health" even if what remains is a hollow shell just waiting to be merged out of existence.

(Look past the anti-Amazon smokescreen around Hachette and you'll see a classic case of a company beefing up its books prior to an auction. Consolidating 5 marketing units into one? Reducing low level body count? Minimizes the bloodletting for the new owners...)

Right now, there are four "big" publishing houses dancing around the giant Randy Penguin, frantically trying to figure out which of them is going to eat which of the others to try and remain relevant in the medium haul. Because all their other options were ditched away in years past in the quest fir efficiency and synergy.

Not going to be pretty.
A lot of freelancer editors are going to hit the market in the next few years.

[calvin-c]

[QUOTE=fjtorres;2855151Not all big companies fall prey to rule by beancounter, okay?([/QUOTE]
I've got to agree with a lot of what you say but mostly I need to correct an error I made. I didn't intend to imply that companies should be ruled by financial managers. I ended up doing that but I didn't intend to. What I believe, and intended to say, was that a company that ignores its finances will fail. A company that ignores quality & customer service will also fail-but quality & customer service aren't enough by themselves. To succeed a company also has to look at costs. Cost/benefit analyses are the responsibility of accountants. Assignment of value to assets that are difficult to value may be the job of non-accountants but once those assets are valued it's up to the accountants, IMO, to determine whether or not the costs of those assets outweigh their value.