My first article in this series proposed a maintenance mission statement.
Owners are satisfied if their assets generate a satisfactory return on investment.
Society is satisfied if the assets do not fail in ways which threaten the environment. Because we are maintaining assets on behalf of other people, it could be said that we are in fact the custodians of the assets concerned. In this context, parallels can be drawn between the custodianship of physical assets and the custodianship of financial assets. In 1494, a Florentine named Pacioli invented double-entry bookkeeping, the process at the heart of financial custodianship. To this day, throughout all branches of organized human endeavor, armies of bookkeepers and accountants use Pacioli's ideas to look after financial assets on behalf of the people who actually own, earn, and spend the money.