Because accounting is not my area of expertise, I was unaware of or hadn't considered the applicability of accounting principles to many of the phenomena he mentioned. Additionally, I didn't fully grasp everything, but I did understand that accounting views employees and a company's responsibilities towards them as liabilities in ways that might not be rational. For example, a machine purchased for a business can be depreciated over time with associated tax benefits, but the time and effort put into hiring a person is not an investment that can be paid for over time; instead, it is an immediate expense and a future obligation. Restates repeatedly that it is irrational to perceive workers as fixed costs when they are subject to layoffs in times of economic crisis. I'd want to read a review by someone with more business acumen; I still am not convinced that the problems he listed in subsequent chapters—like just-in-time scheduling, severe income inequality, and the relentless use of performance metrics to micromanage Amazon warehouse workers—are primarily the result of accounting and finance mistakes.

Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC for an honest review.

In Our Least Important Asset, Peter Cappelli offers that the way we manage employees today is driven by the quirks of financial accounting. He says that this focus on cost reduction has led to a number of harmful practices, such as the use of contingent workers and the erosion of job security. Cappelli argues that we need to rethink the way we manage employees if we want to create a more prosperous and sustainable economy.