- Original Message -
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 16 January 2002 20:56 PM
Subject: Accounting and Economics LO27687
Dear Learners,
I have a few questions. I have a few statements.
Where does the 'buck stop' in modern organizational life?
Who is accountable as a 'leader' -whether as CEO or supervisor?
Is the net result of 'corporate' corruption reversible?
Is someone who drives ordinary and faithful followers to the brink of
total ruin and maybe even suicide a terrorist by another name?
When will those with enough talent and cleverness to manipulate so many
systems of privilege to their own advantage create enough intelligence
within themselves to realise that the time they say they never had enough
of doesn't exist?
Why has no-one (so far as I know in the public domain here) 'picked up'
the tab I offered on the Enron scandal posting I wrote? Is it not a worthy
enough as an issue to have a dialogue on then;-) now, in the near
future...;-)
Tom Johnson the famous ex-accountant, when asked what was 'wrong' with the
system of 'corporate business' said there was 'not enough virtue'. He said
that '70%' of what 'is wrong' is to do with virtue. Was he a twit? What is
virtue worth to corporate life.
As life becomes more transparent a new form of democracy will arise. I can
see it arising. All such emergences have lashing tails, vortices. There is
pain in abundance at attending such birthings. It will be like a kind of
madness. Can anyone here sense it upon the far horizon?
Shall we keep on doing what is familiar and plentiful toward our 'limited
case' mortgages, becoming 'clinically obese' to the point of epidemic
proportions, our children going 'quietly mad' ( one in five children in
'developed countries' sic. show signs of clinical depression) while four
fifths of the world lives on less than two dollars a day?
Where is the virtue, who is the virtuous. Does it matter and do we care?
Mmm
Mr. Andrew Campbell MBA
Oxford
--
I was in Brussels talking about a similar topic yesterday talking to the
Task Force leader on intangibles.
It turns out that up to 85% of value produced and destroyed by large
companies today is not within the remit of accountants, who measure the
other 15% tangible/tranacrtional part with such dominating precision that it
is all that some organisations get driven by. Even more strangely this seems
to suit certain types of managers:
Here's an extract from my diary notes that I post elsewhere:
There are at least 2 types of corporate executives who find that
accountants' measurement blindness to what determines 85% of Value
Productivity/Destruction suits them:
the semi-incompetent: if you published the intangible maps of their
business, many of their investment decisions would look blind,
random...embarassing!
those who are making a killing because they obey all the insider and
disclosure rules because the intangibles information which really matters on
whether this company is investing in something valuable isnt being asked for
( understood in the dynamically unique corporate context). So they can do
mother of all inside dealing without any danger of the law ever calling it
that.
This must be the greatest scandal impacting every human being's value
productivity the world has ever faced without anyone 'knowing'.
If there's anyone in these learning organisation or economics groups or
elsewhere who feels that we should develop a sub-chapter to discuss this
all -and decide who we can lobby - I think the subject's big enough to
demand that we do this now. The net should be a very good medium for an
activist refromation of this sort
Below I reproduce para 115/6 of the EU report which you can link to via the
bookmark at the bottom and which mirror reports recently issued from
Brookings in Washington DC seem to have mirrored:
115. In our expert soundings, the growing disconnect between our established
economic
concepts and business models and today's rapidly-changing economic reality
was readily and
universally acknowledged. At a personal level, interest is invariably high,
but the professional
appetite and commitment of policy makers to embrace change were found to be
disappointingly
low. In this respect, the responses most often encountered were:
a) Apathy, lack of interest.
b) Active resistance to change.
c) White papers and communications that embrace the rhetoric, but fail to
address what is
really needed to implement change.
116. If the recommendations set out in this report are not to be
implemented, we would
strongly prefer it to be as a result of the second response. In other words,
we would prefer a
conscious decision to remain locked in to a 19 th century institutional
mindset, not least because
this would constitute a conscious decision to opt out of the global
competitiveness race. We
would be disappointed with response a), especially if it reflected a lack of
clear communication
on our part and thus
