> You're so, so spectacularly wrong on this, I am honestly gasping for air.
Calm the fuck down. It’s a conversation.
> Accountants are the only people who know if your company is alive or a walking dead. How do you expect to run a company if you don't know reliably and with precision how much money it actually has/makes/spends? Money is the lifeblood of a company! Don't you want to be constantly improving the way you make, spend, and report it to investors and the public?
You entirely missed the point. At no point did I say accounting was not important. I pointed out though that investing more and more into accounting does not boost returns. If that were true, every company could just hire thousands of accountants to boost their profits. This is what separates a cost center from a profit center. Your department provides value in the same way that running water does. It’s critical and you don’t want to skimp on it, but it’s just a part of the business that isn’t helping grow the total market capture.
> The biggest companies in the world typically end up with CEOs that come either from sales or from accounting.
Why would you include sales together with accounting? Sales is precisely the opposite of accounting in this regard because it’s very easy to tie sales directly to revenue. So easy their compensation is literally based on it.
Not so hot take: CEOs that come from accounting and not a customer-oriented profit center are the worst. They know what the numbers look like but are fundamentally disconnected from why customers give money to the business. Seeing the minutiae of the ins and outs of money gives a super false sense of understanding the business. Accounting CEOs are terrible in any industry that requires innovation or getting ahead of trends.