In this monologue, the speaker connects systemic racism in the United States to entrenched capitalist and organizational structures, emphasizing how accounting and legal frameworks reinforce a dominant hierarchical model. Drawing on personal experience as an analyst, the speaker notes that people are absent from the asset side of balance sheets, treated instead as liabilities, which obscures their value and contributes to mass layoffs. The discussion references the 1619 Project’s revelation that amortization was historically used to account for enslaved people’s aging and loss of productivity, illustrating how accounting once explicitly treated humans as property. Although slavery was abolished, the speaker argues that the removal of humans from the asset side was never replaced, leaving a structural blind spot. The speaker further observes a shift from a production economy to a knowledge economy, where standardized tasks are automated, leaving humans to perform creative work. Within organizations, diversity is framed as a “bug” rather than a feature, leading to tokenistic management of differences. The speaker concludes that without fundamentally redesigning financial and accounting systems to recognize human value, cultural and relational divisions will persist.
Chapters
I'll jump in because of what's going on in the US, because I see racism as actually really directly related to a lot of this dominance partnership. How do we relate to to each other. And in the US, it's our original sin as an organization, but because we also drove the capitalist system and the way we organize to produce things, it's also embedded in a lot of the structures. And I'm an analyst by trade, and my background is operations, and I really think structure drives behavior. Meaning we drive unpaved roads when we have the option. We don't drive the straightest course, right? So there's ways you can orchestrate certain kinds of behaviors based on structures. And what is limiting us right now is accounting and legal structures that have reinforced this dominant hierarchical model. And I remember a few years ago, I was talking to an accounting friend of mine, and I don't know what I was doing. I was looking at balance sheets, which is not usually what I do, but I was looking at balance sheets again. And I was like, where are the people on the asset side? And he was like, oh, they're not there. And I was like, what do you mean they're not there? They're just liabilities? No wonder they get laid off in the US. In droves because you can't see their value. And even if you kind of mentally are like, oh yeah, they're our most important resource, if they're not in black and white in the— that accounting is how we account for our values, right? And we use money or financial mechanisms to communicate that. And so I sat with that for years and I was like, I don't I just don't understand how that happened. And then I was digging into the 1619 Project, which is a huge project by the New York Times to explore racism in America and all the different pieces of that. And they, one of the articles was about how brutal capitalism is because of the racism. And it pointed out that amortization was an innovation in accounting to account for enslaved people's aging and lack of production capability. Right? And you sit with that for a while and you're like, that is brutal. That's brutal. Right? And so what that said to me is, oh, people used to be on the asset side of the balance sheet. And at some point they got removed because We don't own them anymore, which is a good thing. They are not considered property anymore, at least explicitly considered property anymore, but it never got replaced. And so you have that going on. And then you have the secondary thing going on, which is we're moving from a production economy to a knowledge economy, right? Everything that is standardized is going to be done by machines or algorithms or AI or something. And so what are humans left to do? We're left to do the creative things. And we're sitting in organizations where diversity is a bug, not a feature. We're trying to put everybody in a box rather than— and so diversity or differences are always an exception to be managed. Rather than something to be optimized. And so until we, my view is until we fix that financial accounting system, how we view that, we will struggle with this divisive relational model. And so it really drives our culture. So I'll end there. Fascinating.
