Our Least Important Asset: Why the Relentless Focus on Finance and Accounting is Bad for Business and Employees

· Gildan Media · Narrated by Tom Perkins
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7 hr 52 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

Real wages have stagnated or declined for most workers, job insecurity has increased, and retirement income is uncertain. Why have jobs gotten so much worse? As Peter Cappelli argues, these issues and others stem from the logic of financial accounting 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.

About the author

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School and director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources. His books include The Future of the Office, Why Good People Can't Get Jobs, and Will College Pay Off?

An award-winning audio engineer for over forty years, Tom Perkins has expanded his skills to narrating and has more than sixty titles to his credit. He learned by working with the world's best voice talent during his career, and he continues to engineer a variety of projects.

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Narrated by Tom Perkins