Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, served as Senior Advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from 2003-2005, was a Distinguished Scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore, and was Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce from 1990-1998. He was recently named by HR Magazine as one of the top 5 most influential management thinkers, by NPR as one of the 50 influencers in the field of aging, and was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and writes a monthly column for HR Executive magazine. His work on performance management, agile systems, and hiring practices, and other workplace topicsappears in the Harvard Business Review.

Preface

Why have jobs gotten so much worse? In Our Least Important Asset, Peter Cappelli argues that as financial accounting has become the guide for determining the success of companies, its inability to assess the reality of employment creates distortions and a short-sighted approach to management. In the process, employers undercut decades of evidence about what works to improve the quality, productivity, and creativity of workers. Drawing on decades of experience and research, Cappelli provides a comprehensive and insightful critique of the modern workplace, where the gaps in financial accounting make things worse for everyone, from employees to investors.