"Lean Dilemma: Choose Systems Principles or Management Accounting Controls, not both"
By H Tom Johnson
Professor of Business Studies - Portland State University - USA - tomj@sba.pdx.edu
The 2007 Shingo Research Prize
We, in the West, view our organisations as mechanical; entities that can be broken down into parts; and we manage each part with a budget or a target. But should we in fact be viewing an enterprise as a "natural living system?" A system where relationships are vital. Tom is an accountant by profession who is very aware of the damage that we have allowed acountants to do to our organisational thinking. He has developed his thinking through studying Toyota where he recognises that they see "improvement primarily in terms of a system of relationshiops - human social systems that is the busienss - and not simply in terms of arithmetic sum of seperate parts." - In other words we move forward by looking at the whole system, not the parts - very relevant to our concept of society having a learning ability.
Tom, with Anders Broms have written the excellent book "Profit Beyond Measure" see Bibliograhy.