I’ve been using my early sabbatical to read, meandering through a range of books recommended to me by my network, which rocks — as does its recommendations.
This has led me to read the following books at the same time, creating a big stew of ideas in my head about what humans need to thrive, how we treat each other and the environment, the stories we tell ourselves and each other, and how we react to toxic environments.
- Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee
- The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Orchid and the Dandelion by W. Thomas Boyce MD
Then Kimberly Scott shared this essay from the New York Times’ 1619 Project with me; In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation by sociologist Matthew Desmond. It immediately clarified the mess of ideas floating around in my head.
It’s the racism, stupid.
Addressing Racism Is Required to Unleash Value
Racism taints everything it touches and it is so embedded in our mindsets and assumptions that we can’t see it — because it is treated by our narratives as a discrete thing that somehow sits separated from other aspects of our thinking. But it sits at the heart of what we accept as truth — and it’s killing us.
Many of today’s corporate structures and practices have their roots in the idea that there are classes of people who are different — and many of them are not as able, capable, or deserving. This idea was necessary to justify the force, abuse, violence, terror, and death used to enslave others. In reality, the vast bulk of the value was produced by the enslaved, while the contribution of the ownership class was brutality and obfuscation. This, too, was then masked by complicated legal and accounting practices designed to make investing appealing to those who otherwise might object and didn’t want to be directly involved in the unsavoriness of abuse.
Accounting for Human Value
For a long time, I have wondered why people only show up on the liability side of the balance sheet and not the asset side and I’ve been told it is too complicated to figure out the value of a person. What the above article helped me see is that people DID originally show up as assets — and amortizing assets at that, because their production value diminished as they aged. Today, we’ve replaced people with things like equipment or ‘goodwill’ because the idea that people amortize is unsavory and yet, in practice, we lay people off in large numbers because human capital and its costs still show up on the liability side of the balance sheet. Incongruously, we tend to lay off those who are more valuable because they are more expensive — but it’s only their cost, not their value that we can see in our accounting.
This is becoming a huge issue as we move from a production economy to a knowledge economy. While people’s ability to produce physical goods diminishes as we age, our knowledge and perspective grow. Investing in learning and education will increase the value of human assets. Our accounting systems, however, treat people like machines and in fact, have a bias toward keeping people so busy producing that they don’t have time to think and learn, so focused is it on output and hourly productivity.
The second big thing that struck me is how much of our thinking around business models is inherited from a time when, if we depleted the land (our raw material), people would just move their operations. Land was so cheap thanks to the US government, who took it by force from native peoples and solid it to the white owner class for a pittance, that it encouraged owners to leverage their investments as much as they could and to scale as quickly as they could. The more they scaled, the more they were rewarded by a structure set up to do just that.
It’s hard not to read these texts and see how many of the assumptions we take for granted in the business world are abusive and brutal.
Assumptions like:
- We need every hour of people’s time and production accounted for
- Those who account for and oversee the production of value are way more valuable than those who do the work
- Without control and abuse, people will not collaborate
- Leveraging capital to maximize scale and growth is the best way to create value
Until we unpack and reconcile these assumptions with how we organize, our organizations will fail at scaling knowledge, learning, and change.