There is no more powerful question in a U.S. corporation than “What’s the ROE on that?”
Social media spending? Wellness checkups? Better working conditions? Elimination of bribes
overseas? Return-on-equity hurdles threaten them all. Conversely, why market cigarettes?
ROE justifies the means.
How did this criterion come to dominate not just investment decisions but then business as a
whole and now political culture? It’s because, a hundred years ago, squeezing every drop of
return out of equity capital made great sense. As the industrial revolution progressed, society
was enjoying enormous benefits from mass production, which brought luxuries within reach
of the middle class. Just as electronic commerce would later transform business, mass
production swept into one industry after another. But unlike websites, factories were capital
intensive. The revolution ran on equity capital, which was in short supply. Any manager
would have been right to conclude that allocating capital according to expected return on
equity would produce the greatest good.
This doesn’t mean that ROE was the point of business—the overall objective of commerce in
society was then, like now, to better people’s welfare. But the opportunities to put capital in
the service of that goal were numerous. Investors, playing the role of the peahens and
determining which enterprises would continue to the next generation, needed a proxy
variable with which to quickly and objectively size up their options for financial mates, and
ROE filled the bill very well. Thus was born the feedback loop that to this day drives the mania
for managing quarterly earnings to meet investor expectations.
The feedback frenzy rose to a new level in 1917, when General Motors was in financial
difficulty and DuPont took a major position in the company. (GM represented an important
channel for DuPont’s lacquer, artificial leather, and other products, and Pierre du Pont sat on
GM’s board.) DuPont sent Donaldson Brown, a promising engineer-turned-finance staffer, to
Detroit to sort things out, and sort them out he did.
Brown noted a simple fact: Return on equity can be broken down into a three-part equation. It
is the product of return on sales times the ratio of sales to assets times the ratio of assets to
equity. By parsing ROE into the DuPont Equation (very rapidly to become a business school
mainstay), he provided the financial basis for organizations’ dividing into functions, each
with their own objectives. He reasoned that if marketers worked on maximizing return on
sales, production managers were rewarded for the sales they wrung out of their physical
plant, and finance managers focused on minimizing the amount of equity capital they
needed, ROE would take care of itself.
Thus Brown laid the foundations of today’s hated silos. Incentives spurred managers down
paths that became treacherous. In their pursuit of margin, marketers sought market power
even to the point of monopoly, prompting Congress to strengthen antitrust laws. Production
engineers treated their factories royally and their labor like serfs, spurring unions to amass
strength and force new labor laws into effect. Financial managers, supported by their bankers,
increased their debt-to-equity ratios until capital requirements were imposed—wait, strike
that, until there was a catastrophic financial crash and a Great Depression. Then banking
regulations were imposed. (Apparently unconvinced of the causal link, we reran the
experiment in the 1980s. Once again the outcome was near fatal.)
In each case a runaway was at work. Managers were prized according to their performance on
one dominant criterion—and because it was so clearly defined, so objectively measurable, so
useful in management, and so reliably rewarded, the feedback loop was powerful indeed. In
evolutionary biology terms, natural selection was at odds with sexual selection; society—the environment in which firms lived—was finding the proxies unsuitable and insisting that
capital should be allocated using broader criteria. Yet the components of ROE outlined by
Brown continued to be pursued single-mindedly, and the ROE runaway continued.
The Depression only intensified the need to get returns from scarce equity and tightened the
focus on performance markers that could be measured with motivating precision, even if they
were not quite the point. In the 1930s people not surprisingly wondered how the Depression
had come about. What is surprising, perhaps, is that there was no system of economic
measurement that could provide an answer. At the behest of the U.S. Department of
Commerce, Simon Kuznets, of the National Bureau of Economic Research, proposed one—the
National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA)—to the Senate. His recommendations led to
the apparatus that generates the overall measure of GDP. For 70 years now, NIPA has summed
up for us how well we’re doing and has served as the model for economic measurement
around the world.
Winston Churchill observed that “First we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” and
the same is even more true of our performance metrics. Enormous political weight is given to
GDP, and GDP per capita, but very little to the many other indicators of value creation.
Rankings of crime, education, health, and happiness have only recently become available,
and no one’s bonus depends on them. In indices that track the performance of world
economies, the U.S. routinely fails to make the top 10 on nonfinancial dimensions but
continues to make choices on the basis of GDP impact.
To an even greater degree, financial measurement shapes thinking and action at the
enterprise level. Since the 1980s—the decade of deregulation and economic value analysis—
business leaders in the U.S. (and to a lesser extent the rest of the G7) have focused ever more
narrowly on ROE as the gauge of success.
But globally, value measurement is on the cusp of change, for two reasons. First, a new
measurement infrastructure is taking shape, owing in significant part to technology. Second,
the segment of the world’s population that cares about nonfinancial performance indicators is growing.