"Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together"
About this Quote
Reich is smuggling a quiet coup into the language of balance sheets: the real "wealth" of a firm isn’t what investors can count, but what employees know, share, and invent. The opening move is a deliberate bait-and-switch. By naming "financial assets" first, he nods to the default corporate religion, then dethrones it with a definition of value that accounting systems notoriously struggle to capture. It’s less inspirational poster than strategic provocation: if you manage a company like capital is the crown jewel, you’ll treat labor as a cost to minimize. If people are the possession, the entire moral math flips.
The subtext is a critique of late-20th-century shareholder primacy and the era’s faith that markets measure what matters. Reich is pushing human capital, but also something more politically charged: power. "What they carry around in their heads" isn’t just skill; it’s bargaining leverage in a knowledge economy where ideas, relationships, and tacit know-how can walk out the door at 5 p.m. The word "possession" is telling, too - it hints at ownership, but the thing you’re supposedly owning is autonomous and mobile. That tension is the point.
"Ability to work together" lands as the line that separates mere talent from durable advantage. Individual brilliance is portable; coordination is cultivated. Read in context of globalization and deindustrialization, Reich is arguing that competitiveness can’t be offshored as easily when it depends on trust, shared language, and institutional memory. He’s also issuing a warning: undermine wages, stability, or dignity, and you’re not trimming fat - you’re liquidating the only asset that compounds.
The subtext is a critique of late-20th-century shareholder primacy and the era’s faith that markets measure what matters. Reich is pushing human capital, but also something more politically charged: power. "What they carry around in their heads" isn’t just skill; it’s bargaining leverage in a knowledge economy where ideas, relationships, and tacit know-how can walk out the door at 5 p.m. The word "possession" is telling, too - it hints at ownership, but the thing you’re supposedly owning is autonomous and mobile. That tension is the point.
"Ability to work together" lands as the line that separates mere talent from durable advantage. Individual brilliance is portable; coordination is cultivated. Read in context of globalization and deindustrialization, Reich is arguing that competitiveness can’t be offshored as easily when it depends on trust, shared language, and institutional memory. He’s also issuing a warning: undermine wages, stability, or dignity, and you’re not trimming fat - you’re liquidating the only asset that compounds.
Quote Details
| Topic | Team Building |
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