Intellectual capital

Intellectual capital - its value is not accounted for. When in Sweden they lay people off, it's last-in, first-out, so it's the youngsters that tend to go. A recent Swedish acquaintance's company had trained a number of engineers, thousands of them for a Swedish company (Volvo?), but when redundancies came, it was the newly trained youngsters who went. This was expensive training given over several days at a high cost per day. When nearly twohundred of the newly trained personnel were made redundant, the older managers and project managers had to take over their jobs and also had to be trained, at cost to the company. That cost doesn't show up on the books. The accounts don't show that they let go highly and expensively trained engineers. That doesn't show in the accounts. Intellectual capital resides in intangibles.

Bit silly really. Perhaps it's not worth believing quantitative reports.