And Peter Drucker, in his book, The Practice of Management, discussed the concept in 1954. The idea, starting with Drucker and continuing today, is that employees will perform better and feel better about their job if they understand the business and how they make an impact. Business literacy is the ability to read financial and operational metrics and understand how one makes an impact on those metrics. Psychic ownership is the idea that employees feel, think and act like owners. One of the important elements of acting like an owner is having the knowledge about financial and operational metrics.
Metrics are no longer something used as history, but rather used as tools to proactively manage.
It seems as if most employees, just from the fact of being a part of the organization and working there every day, would understand how the business operates and how success is measured. And the problem exists at the manager level as well. Managers get promoted, but most of the time are never taught how to read the financials. It is just assumed that once they are promoted they can somehow read the statements. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that once promoted, they are probably not going to admit they don't know how to read the statements.