As the personal computer networked management offices round the world in the late 80s, the then Big 5 global acountants raced to control how corporate performance was measured. Unfortunately they never changed their century old tradition of being experts at adding up lifeless stocks but assuming all people were costs to cut. This wasn't exactly forward thinking given that the world's largest nations were already more service economy-led than thing valued, and were to become exponentially more so with the internet and knowledge co-working era connecting all truly productive and demanding relationships. The consequence was the metrics that tangible accountants used to monitor goodwill, trust, purpose, trnansparency and sustainbility could not have been calculated to have been less globally true in seeing what exponentials up or down organisational networks were spinning through local communities

It took academics 10 years to complete the research of Unseen Wealth. By 2000 their report - one of the boldest ever issued - clarfied that any nation that governed its biggest organisations without the missing metrics would compound unseen risks and lose its national shirt so to speak. Even as the case of Enron proved the reasoning - showing how a nothing utility company could be cpmpounded in under 10 years of quarterly misleading numbers into one of the top 50 forces in the world. American's Global professions looked the other way - the result wall street's decade of mass financial destruction.

 Jan 2008: nine year old asks 1000 New Yorkers and Dr Yunus about the future state of banking