utterly inadequate at relating internal costs to external wealth created, and simply ignores the wealth-producing capacity of an organization. This is why we see market valuations many multiples of book value. Fra Luca Pacioli, who introduced the world to double-entry bookkeeping in 1494, may have been wrong—debits don’t equal credits, and the gap represents the wealth-creating potential
of an enterprise. Our accounting model completely ignores human capital, by treating it as an expense, even though the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker estimates human capital is responsible for approximately three-fourths of the wealth in any country.
Rather than maximizing shareholder value, leaders should focus on the wealth-creating capacity of their organizations, which is, ultimately, the leading indicator for optimizing shareholder value. As Jack Welch pointed out, “One thing we’ve discovered with certainty is that anything we do that makes the customer more successful inevitably results in a financial return for us” (quoted in Khalsa, 1999: 25).
Another reason we lose sight of the truth that businesses exist to create wealth is that the language of business is drawn largely from war and sports analogies. In sports, a competition is usually zero-sum; meaning one competitor wins, and the other loses. This is not at all relevant in a business setting. Just because your competitors flourish does not mean you lose. There is room for both FedEx and UPS, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Ford and General Motors, and while their sparring might be mistaken as some war, as John Kay points out “not in Pepsi’s wildest fantasies does it imagine that the conflict will end in the second burning of Atlanta [Coca-Cola’s head office]” (quoted in Koch, 2001: 73). When Coca-Cola changed their recipe to New Coke, company spokesman Carlton Curtis stated, “You’re talking about having some guts—and doing something that few managements would have the guts to do.” If you find it amusing that grown men talk about guts and recipes in the same sentence, then it should be obvious that business has nothing to do with war.
Business is not about annihilating your competition; it is about adding more value to your customers. War destroys, commerce builds. Both sides to a transaction must profit or it would not take place, a point made as far back as the 1700s by Adam Smith. Marketplaces are conversations, derived from the Greek marketplace, the agora. It is where buyers and sellers meet to discuss their wares, share visions of the future, where supply and demand intersect at the equilibrium point with a handshake. It is as far removed from war as capitalism is from communism, and perhaps this war analogy, too, needs to be tossed onto the ash heap of history.