Extending the Will internal currency into individual management accounting (2011)

Choosing what to put a price on

A scheme that puts prices on work inside a company and has employees buy and sell it is normally built as a personnel system. The core of this decision is that Disco did not build it that way. The official description calls Will accounting a management-accounting system and states plainly that personnel evaluation is handled elsewhere. Not how much to pay whom, but how much a given job is worth — decided by employees among themselves. A design in which the more disliked the work, the higher the winning bid, was an attempt to shift into price the unfairness that had until then been absorbed at a superior’s discretion.

It cannot be said, though, that the mechanism produced the results. The more-than-fourfold growth in sales from the year to March 2011 to the year to March 2026 owes much to demand for semiconductors themselves. Reflection in bonuses began at 3% in fiscal 2014 and was applied gently. What individual Will accounting supported was less the size of the profit than the habit of employees keeping an eye on the income and expenses of their own patch even as the market swung. How showy a system is and where it actually bites do not necessarily coincide.