I used to work in product development, on children’s character licensed toys and books.

Successful commercial story telling – that is, the kind you can license – is skilful, powerful, and provides children with things that they need; materials to weave into themselves, objects they can bounce off the physical and social world and themselves, and listen to what the bounce-back tells them. 

Product development for very young children is therefore a serious endeavour, but not enough of the people and organisations who determine what becomes available to children, are able to take it seriously enough in terms of its purpose for the end users. In licensing, which collectively makes up a large proportion of the items available at retail for young children, it is fragmented by different IP owners competing against each other for shrinking retail space. Too much of the competition takes place largely on the price axis, and secondarily, with respect to features which talk superficially to sales people, rather than providing anything of any use to the eventual user. This is an effect of commercial pressures over time.  Many of the people who are trapped in this dynamic would like it to be different, but the creative people and the psychologists working in the space can struggle to unify and influence effectively, because often they’ve been isolated from each other, by working for competing organisations, and because the big retailers call the shots. There are great people doing great things; but that makes it all the more heart breaking when someone with power says “The buyer wants lights and sounds, and a 29.99 price point” and another demonic, useless, unloveable, tinny-sounding robot is born.

A long time ago, in a wilder, less consolidated and less digitised and controllable world, there were hard-to-patrol corners where you could quietly get great work done and out on shelf, if you were lucky, now and then. These have gradually and systematically been enclosed and brought within the purview of someone very senior whose main objective is not to offend or even surprise retailers.

I retrained in audit because I wanted to get out of the creative / commercial space. I wanted to do something technical that didn’t absorb my emotional, moral and creative energy, in the same way, and leave me so little room to be proud of my work. I didn’t want to sign another contract that assigned everything I did, even in my own time, to my employer. And it had been a long time; I wanted a change and I wanted to learn something. 

From the first day of my new job I was given 7 days at college to learn the principles of accounting, with hand-drawn T accounts in pencil, and after 6 weeks I passed my first exam in it. In those 6 weeks I learnt how to use T accounts – two strokes of a pencil looking like a house with two rooms and a roof – to build villages of houses for numbers. 

These gradually transformed the inchoate tangle of vague numerical concepts that had lain strewn about the floor of my mind, like bricks tipped out of a toy box, into homes for insight and comprehension. The two strokes of a T account are the first struts that support a structural understanding of the numerical blood of businesses, and lift up chambers and spaces you can walk through, and see. 

These were only villages, and only toy ones; but I was being given the tools that would show how whole real cities could in principle be built. My job, when I was qualified to do it, would not be to build them, however; I was gradually being given the keys to these cities, learning how I would walk among them and not be dizzied by their soaring heights and hidden dungeon passages, and how to stand on high bridges and see them whole, and how to unlock secret corners and find the small hidden toxic locked boxes that could threaten whole enterprises. 

(I did not pay a penny for this. I did not even pay for the train to get there.)

These are some of the things I thought about:

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A balance sheet is a list of nouns; an income statement is a list of verbs. 

Luca Pacioli hung out with Leonardo da Vinci in 15th century Milan and systematised double entry accounting while getting his friend to illustrate the geometrical parts of his massive mathematical treatise: the association of accounting with soulless boredom is like the tedium of airports conspiring to make us forget how incredible it is that we are about to fly.  

The top thing on the balance sheet is intangible non current assets: the most important thing on that list is the intellectual property, for an entity that has any. 

The top thing on the income statement is revenue, which is the most important thing on that list, for an entity that has any.

The difference between accuracy and precision, and which you prefer, whether or not you know the difference, goes to the heart of what kind of an auditor you are. 

Which is less, or more, thinkable: being without doing, or doing without being? (Answer this from your gut, without asking Descartes.) 

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There is a dynamic in the more unsophisticated organisations (not all of them, but all industries have some unsophisticated organisations), where the product development team are treated like annoying children: the sales people are the serious people who do hard things with numbers and targets; the people who think about what a book or a toy should actually be, from the point of view of the person who will use it, are fools, naive, and supported like feckless children on the labour of the real workers.

Sales people in IP owning licensing entities sometimes call themselves “revenue generating staff”. They work on the top line of the income statement, and they call themselves “revenue generating” to remind you of this – that they bring the life blood into the body – and sometimes (let’s be nice, and say very occasionally) they even say things like, “You wouldn’t have a job without me” (when they are trying to do something outrageous as a favour for a friend who wants to buy something precious for peanuts, and then trash it).

Lights and sounds; 29.99; get on with it.

Here is something I came to realise: product development people working in-house for an IP owner also build the top line. We work in the service of intangible assets – the balance sheet top line. But the sales people who think we’re a waste of space live only in the income statement; they don’t recognise the balance sheet, they’ve forgotten it exists, they run so fast (are made to run so fast) in their constant world of doing-words that they have forgotten about being-words. 

So they think we are an admin expense, an inconvenient and irksome debit below the gross profit, which, it is implied, could be almost completely rationalised away in a properly run business. This explains their contempt for us. 

It’s misplaced. You can’t have an income statement without a balance sheet, and we are top line of the balance sheet. 

(Don’t get me started on the cash flow statement. )

I still think about product development a lot. 

Postman Pat © 2014 Woodland Animations Limited. Original writer John Cunliffe. Lic. Royal Mail Group plc.

All other content copyright Deirdre Heaney

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