Letter From the Editor

• Published date: 01 October 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22204
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Author: James B. Edwards

7

© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22204

Letter From the Editor

Dear JCAF Reader,

I wish to express my appre-

ciation to the readers of JCAF

who patronized the journal

during 2015. The majority of

subscribers are site licenses

with hundreds of readers at

each site with access privileges.

The subscribers reside all over

the world, with every continent

represented. They include indi-

viduals, public libraries, trade

associations, academia, busi-

ness, government, researchers,

and experts in all areas of busi-

ness and economics.

During 2015 the aver-

age number of accesses was

approximately 13,000 per

month with a couple of months

around 17,000. Many of these

accesses result in printouts that

are then copied for additional

viewers, especially at universi-

ties where an instructor shares

to many from only one access.

This volume represents an

increase of approximately 6%

compared to 2014.

The primary theme in this

issue features articles on non-

traditional financial reporting

and business improvement and

valuation ideas for managing

business processes and recog-

nizing human assets. Other top-

ics include revenue recognition,

capital structure, ethics for

CPAs, information technology

(IT) change management, and

“bloated” financial accounting

records and procedures.

In the lead article, “Your

Best Performance Measure

Is the One You Don’t Need,”

authors Chuck Thomas and

Tom Pryor propose ideas and

present examples of how orga-

nizations are better served by

focusing on the improvement

of business processes and cor-

porate culture. The authors

see the need to use more social

controls (core values, beliefs,

norms, and symbols) to pro-

vide an alternative to technical

controls. Social controls appeal

to the emotional, nonrational,

affective elements within

employees. Reliance, as much

as possible, on social controls

promotes efficiency. Unnec-

essary reliance on technical

controls represents a form of

waste. Guidance and empower-

ment are seen as the key ingre-

dient to establishing effective

social controls. You should

focus on only a few measures

that lead to success rather

too many metrics. The limits

of human focus bound the

number of feasible action-pro-

ducing messages derived from

performance measures. Too

many performance measures

only create collateral noise

rather than corporate harmony

of purpose.

In the second article,

“Human Capital: A Strategic

Asset Whose Time Has Come

to Be Recognized on Organiza-

tions’ Financial Statements,”

authors Marc Sollosy, Marjorie

McInerney, and Charles K.

Braun focus on the idea that

the value of the human capital

assets should be measured and

considered part of the organi-

zation’s market value. Given

that this subject has been dis-

cussed profusely in the past,

the value of this article today

comes from the exploration of

knowledge-based economies,

which has strengthened the

argument for setting value to

those producing creative and

innovative processes within the

organization. Central to this

article is the belief that human

capital is an accountable asset,

which must be valued on cor-

porate financial statements, as

Infosys has adopted since 2008.

The argument that financial

value cannot be attached to

labor does not seem to be sup-

ported in the knowledge-based

economy when it is claimed that

an organization’s most valu-

able asset is its people. If a true

comparison of organizations

takes place, can that compari-

son ignore its human capital?