Profit per employee

O número 1 da revista “The McKinsey Quarterly” de 2007, apresenta um interessante artigo intitulado “The new metrics of corporate performance: Profit per employee”, da autoria de Lowell Bryan.

As ideias fundamentais que retive foram:

“Let’s get right to the point: companies focus far too much on measuring returns on invested capital (ROIC) rather than on measuring the contributions made by their talented people.”

“Increasingly, companies create wealth by converting these “raw” intangibles into the institutional skills, patents, brands, software, customer bases, intellectual capital, and networks that raise profit per employee and ROIC. These intangibles are true capital, in the sense of delivering cash returns, even though the sources of those returns are intangible. Indeed, the most valuable capital that companies possess today is precisely intangible rather than financial.”

“Financial performance (seen through balance sheets, cash flow reports, and income statements) no doubt is and will remain the principal metric for evaluating a company and its management. But it’s time to recognize that financial performance increasingly comes from returns on talent, not on capital.”

“To boost the potential for wealth creation, strategically minded executives must embrace a radical idea: changing financial-performance metrics to focus on returns on talent rather than returns on capital alone.”

“The difference is that viewing profit per employee as the primary metric puts the emphasis on the return on talent. This approach focuses the minds of managers on increasing profit relative to the number of people a company employs. It suggests that the most valuable use of an organization’s talent is the creation and use of intangibles.”

“Profit per employee therefore focuses companies on intangible-intensive value propositions and, in turn, on talented people—those who, with some investment, can produce valuable intangibles.”

“Executives should therefore look at ROIC mainly as a sanity check. So long as the return exceeds the cost, profit per employee is the better metric because it not only represents the scarcest resource but also reflects profit after the expensing of necessary investments.”