General Electric has an addiction to putting bean counters into leadership positions:
Bean-counters can appear to make money when they're often just sowing the seeds of future destruction. Goes on all the time. Companies get fat and sloppy. The new bean-counters arrive and find and cut the fat and slop. The trouble is, they don’t know how to do anything but cut—their entire toolbox consists of knives. And if all you’ve got is a knife, everything looks like something to be cut. They can make themselves look brilliant with their spreadsheets, showing all the fat cut and the temporarily improved bottom line to their masters in the boardroom or at the bank. But they have no idea where to stop. If they're left there in power or, worse, gain power, they just keep cutting.
Saving a dollar has a lot of merit. Recapturing a truly wasted dollar is a lot better than making one—you may need 10 or 20 or 100 to have one stick to the bottom line. But when a dollar is saved at the expense of crippling the business’s growth, damaging its relationship with and hold on its customers, or killing its spirit, it is a dollar saved with a future cost of 10 or 100. Bean-counters don’t grasp these distinctions. To them, a penny saved is a penny earned, period.