You do a disservice to all by using "beancounters". The term seems harmless. Instead, we have taken the best and brightest among us and incentivized them to do all the wrong things by extracting instead of creating value. Being an engineer, I have an instinctive feel for how the basic rules apply across multiple disciplines. Water wetting out a floor is basically the same thing as current dispersion across a conductive plane.
The basics are my go to. I see the same thing in politics as I see in Tort Law as I see in corporate governance. Beancounters is most certainly too benign a term for my tastes. I do not think it accurately reflects the threat posed by the approach.
As alway, JMO.
I don't think the executives of most companies today are the best and brightest. They are often not that competent at whatever the company actually does, but instead have skills and talents to rise in the corporate ladder. My father was talking about the handwriting on the wall when getting an MBA became the big thing in the 70s and 80s.
My father, as a business owner, started MBA programs at both UCLA and USC, but quit both because he said there was intense focus on turning a profit with no thought about the product the company produced. He saw the same thing proliferate throughout industry in the following years.
The "beancounter" term comes from an article I read in the Oil & Gas Journal over 30 years ago. The article was about the three stages of an oil and gas company, but it applies to most companies too. The stages are:
1) Entrepreneurial - The company is in its early days and run by someone with a lot of ideas, but maybe not the best business sense. A lot of companies go out of business during this time, but it's a very dynamic time for a company.
2) Engineer - If a company survives the early stage, the founder often steps aside and someone who has been around the company and risen in the ranks takes over. The company's early dynamism is gone, but the top management understands the business intimately, often because they helped build it. Companies rarely go out of business during this phase and while profit don't grow massively like they did in stage 1, growth is slow and steady.
3) Beancounter - The accountants take over and run the company into the ground because they are MBAs who have no clue about what the company makes and they don't care. Short term profits are everything and the company ends up slowly declining until it collapses.
The TV Show Silicon Valley is about the Entrepreneurial phase of a company. There isn't much in TV or movies about the Engineering phase because there are few dramatic moments that an audience would be interested in.
In the car industry, people like Lee Iacoca were the last of the engineers to rise to high management in the mainstream industry. He worked his way up actually selling cars for a short while early in his career. He knew what did and didn't work in the car industry and he managed to turn Chrysler around when they were on the ropes the first time.
Tesla is on the Entrepreneurial/Engineering cusp. It's time for Elon to step aside and let someone with better people skills run the day to day operations of the company. He's a natural disrupter, which is fine for some things, but bad when trying to run a stable company.
Most of the large US companies that have failed in the last 20 years have done so because of a combination of the market changing and the beancounters running them not knowing how to change course when it did.
The US Constitution mandates that revenue raising bills originate in the House of Representatives. This would include tariffs, which were the primary means to raise revenues during the early days of the republic. Congress ceded that responsibility regarding tariffs to President Wilson as an emergency measure during World War I, over a century ago. That has never been rescinded.
It seems to me that ceding that obligation to the president should have required a constitutional amendment rather than a mere statute. What do you lawyers out there have to say?
That's a good question, I'll ask my SO, but I think I read somewhere that the reason this power was ceded to the president was for it to only be applied for national defense issues. Under the constitution, the executive branch has the responsibility for national defense and as war making ability became more technological, it was thought the president needed more power to influence industry to prevent industries critical to defense from going overseas.
So it was a national defense issue rather than a national income generating thing. Even by 1917 the usefulness of tariffs for national income was getting pretty weak, but they did still have some usefulness in protecting domestic industries. That's how they are generally used in most countries today. I think some small countries still use tariffs to generate national income, but for larger countries there are much better ways.
