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I absolutely love this article and I think this could be OPs problem. CFO's (or controllers, or COO's with spreadsheets) seem to have only one hammer, and every

I absolutely love this article and I think this could be OPs problem. CFO's (or controllers, or COO's with spreadsheets) seem to have only one hammer, and everything begins to look like a nail. Costs, of any type, start to look bad. These can start with little things like niceties ("That fruit bowl costs us $20 a day, that's $5200 a year"). It can move into other areas ("Why do engineers need a new MBP and Thunderbolt display when they start here. We could save $1000 per employee by giving them a 21 inch monitor"). It's a slippery slope when you have a finance person who only looks at ways to reduce costs. Suddenly you might even get into some really uncomfortable conversations like: "I noticed engineers take a 1 hour lunch and leave after 8 hours of working... you know if we could get them to work during lunch and stay just a bit longer we could reduce our highest cost center, the engineers, by 20%!" This is where you hope your company has a good set of founders or management that push against the proposed changes and collaborates with the finance people. But that doesn't always happen.

brudgers 11y ago
Companies sometimes forget that they're not in the business of saving money.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  They're in the business of generating profit. Management need to show year upon year growth no matter how little sense it makes. One way of doing that over the short term is to slash costs, with costs lower profits are higher, and thus the manager can receive a nice fat bonus and maybe get promoted. Only problem is these short term cost savings result in medium to long term damage, which can ultimately destroy a company's profit making potential (e.g. HP). You see this all the time. A successful business brings in a CEO or CFO, they slash costs all over the place, the board loves them for 2-4 years and they leverage their success to get a better job at another business. A few years after they left, profits at the old business start to fall, because the slashing had unintended side effects (e.g. like making the business less competitive), but it took time for those negative effects to start to be apparent (particularly to higher tier staff and the board). However now everyone blames the CEO/CFO who took over after the "successful" one because nobody realised the delay between the cause and effect. A lot of MBA-types have a trail of fire behind them. They've built a career on it. Your first warning should be slashing R&D departments.
scottmcdot 11y ago
I am working in Vienna (Austria) and I am not sure whether the company's time-keeping scheme represents the majority of companies in Vienna or it is a manifestation of an ultra-lean mid-size company. I've worked in consulting and, sure, you need to track project time, but I am now working in an R&D role and it seems so unnatural to clock-on and clock-off. We receive a 30min lunch break, during which we need to clock off. We need to have an average of 40 hours logged per week during the course of a calendar month. By Austrian law, an employee must take a 30min break after six hours’ work. IT and software receive dual 24" but R&D (also programming-intensive), along with project managers, HR, etc. receive one 24". So I and the rest of the R&D team are constantly thrashing the Ubuntu Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 4/8/6/2 command to sprawl four windows onto one screen. I think it was a poor decision not to group R&D with software in terms of monitor requirements.

brudgers 11y ago

Companies sometimes forget that they're not in the business of saving money.

Someone1234 11y ago
They're in the business of generating profit. Management need to show year upon year growth no matter how little sense it makes. One way of doing that over the short term is to slash costs, with costs lower profits are higher, and thus the manager can receive a nice fat bonus and maybe get promoted. Only problem is these short term cost savings result in medium to long term damage, which can ultimately destroy a company's profit making potential (e.g. HP). You see this all the time. A successful business brings in a CEO or CFO, they slash costs all over the place, the board loves them for 2-4 years and they leverage their success to get a better job at another business. A few years after they left, profits at the old business start to fall, because the slashing had unintended side effects (e.g. like making the business less competitive), but it took time for those negative effects to start to be apparent (particularly to higher tier staff and the board). However now everyone blames the CEO/CFO who took over after the "successful" one because nobody realised the delay between the cause and effect. A lot of MBA-types have a trail of fire behind them. They've built a career on it. Your first warning should be slashing R&D departments.

scottmcdot 11y ago

I am working in Vienna (Austria) and I am not sure whether the company's time-keeping scheme represents the majority of companies in Vienna or it is a manifestation of an ultra-lean mid-size company. I've worked in consulting and, sure, you need to track project time, but I am now working in an R&D role and it seems so unnatural to clock-on and clock-off. We receive a 30min lunch break, during which we need to clock off. We need to have an average of 40 hours logged per week during the course of a calendar month. By Austrian law, an employee must take a 30min break after six hours’ work. IT and software receive dual 24" but R&D (also programming-intensive), along with project managers, HR, etc. receive one 24". So I and the rest of the R&D team are constantly thrashing the Ubuntu Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 4/8/6/2 command to sprawl four windows onto one screen. I think it was a poor decision not to group R&D with software in terms of monitor requirements.