Age of the Bean Counters

Will the age of the bean counters ever be over?

The last 15 years have seen companies move from great employees making great products to how much can we reduce costs to show a great profit for this quarter. Keeping costs reasonable of course is one of many facets of balancing a business for growth and profit, but over the last 15 years cost containment became the driving purpose for companies.

Having a long term vision for the company and its products paled into insignificance. Products became commodities. Employees became commodities. Everything became a commodity to be manipulated by the bean counters even down to the company sponsored cafeteria, getting that last penny of cost savings. In the process these companies damaged themselves and their futures.

There are few of the old style companies left. Steve Jobs at Apple knows how to have a vision for products and the company. His only flaw is that he's from the 1970's when companies tried to make everything proprietary. Google founders have a vision of where they want to go and they don't treat their employees as commodities.

When employees at most companies finally realized they were commodities they started acting as commodities. They now do the work requested no more no less. Any ideas they have that might really advance the company are kept to themselves. After all they'll probably only be there a few years and move on. The only goal is to advance their career and income. The company is incidental.

Occasionally, a few employess will want to do something worthwhile. That's what happened many years ago with the Motorola RAZR phone. A small group of engineers led by a charismatic leader said what if we could design a phone incredibly thin. They wanted to do it just to see if it could be done. They had to do it in secret because the bean counters would have crushed the project because the phone would be too expensive to build and the project would waste resources that could be used to do incremental improvements to their existing products. At that time Motorola wasn't doing all that well as a company. Well the engineers succeeded in their design, the company started selling the phone, and the bean counters were shocked that people would pay so much money for a phone. Unfortunately, the charismatic leader died, the bean counters took over and then tried to incrementally keep changing the heck out of the RAZR design. As time went on, the bean counters managed the profit for the next quarter and never realized when the RAZR phone was starting to lose relevancy in the phone market. They were a one trick pony. As the RAZR era faded, sales started to fade, and now Motorola is once again a company that is rapidly becoming irrelevant in the cell phone market.

I worked for one of these companies that went from vision to bean counting. The company I worked for had a vision 15 years ago to produce products that would have the maximum performance but the least impact on the environment and would move fastest through testing and acceptance through the EPA. After many mergers, this vision was lost as bean counting became the main focus. The results were chemical products that damage the tanks containing the product and chemical products that require the dealer sites to make sure the product is stirred daily or else it won't work correctly when they sell it to the customer. The company actually setup a weekly sampling from every dealer site, lab testing of those samples and IT designed an automatic reporting systems of the lab test results because the customer business sites weren't keeping the product stirred. How's that for a bean counting vision. The company is still making money, but you have to wonder should there be major shift somewhere by a competitor would they have the employees that could respond to the challenge.

One last example of bean counters run amuck. The current CEO of Chrysler last gig was at Home Depot. The founders of Home Depot brought in this CEO from GE because the business was getting bigger than they wanted to handle. This CEO implemented his bean counting vision. He replaced the employees who had good construction knowlege and great customer skills with low wage employees and with less employees. After all an employee is a commodity, why not get the least expensive employee. The profits for each quarter soared at first but then Home Depot sales started cratering. No one wanted to shop there any more because you couldn't find anyone to help you and when you did they didn't know any more than you did. Customers started taking their business to Lowe's. Home Depot was on its way out. Fortunately, this CEO was removed and the new CEO is reestablishing Home Depot's former customer service.

Its time to return to the vision of great employees making great products. After all the business knowlege, ideas, etc. are in the employees heads. Employees are not commodities. They are the key to a companies success. Amazon knows this. Google knows this. Companies like AT&T, Dupont, Corning, knew this back in the 1960. They had visions back then. AT&T did basic research. They wanted to know everything about communication and electronics. Dupont want to know everything about chemicals. Corning wanted to know everything about glass. For the last 20 years however these companies have been focused on merger, acquisitions, profit, etc. Those are not bad things, but they lost their vision along the way and actually hurt the profits they were trying to maximize.

Let's all return to the greatness of the past. Lets focus on doing great and wonderful things. Let's stop focusing on our stock options, 401K's, and how many years we have until retirement. Let's be alive again. The future is now not when we retire.

Let's return to vision! As Steve Jobs said, let's make a dent in the universe.