North American Business Press
About the Book
Waste has plagued almost every industrial-age firm for the past century. In this powerfully argued alternative to conventional cost management thinking, experts H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms assert that any company can avoid the waste that is generated through excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses from market instability in the long run. To gain more secure levels of profitability, management must simply change how it thinks about work and how it organizes work.Profit Beyond Measure details how two extremely profitable manufacturers, Toyota and the Swedish truck maker Scania, have rejected the traditional mechanistic mindset of managing by results that generates waste. Johnson and BrÖms explain how Toyota and Scania achieve their legendary cost advantage through a revolutionary concept they call managing by means (MBM). Instead of being driven to meet preconceived accounting targets, the production systems of Toyota and Scania are governed by the three precepts that guide all living systems: self-organization, interdependence, and diversity.Amid a wealth of new insights into Toyota's vaunted system, Johnson and Bröms introduce the tools of MBM to show how design, production, and profitability analysis are done to customer order. They demonstrate that by following the principles that emulate life systems, even a lean and profitable company can organize work to greatly lessen its long-term earnings instability and sharply reduce its short-run operating costs.Scania has achieved sixty-five years of financial stability and longevity in the face of fierce competition. Toyota has amassed a market value since 1988 that has rivaled -- or sometimes surpassed -- the American "Big Three" automakers combined. The principles that Johnson and Bröms set forth in Profit Beyond Measure can guarantee the same richer, longer life to any company that applies them.
About the Author
Thomas Johnson is Professor of Business Administration at Portland State University in Oregon and Distinguished Consulting Professor of Sustainable Business at Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington. He was named one of the 200 leading management thinkers living today in a survey published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003. In 2007 he received two awards for distinguished lifetime achievement: the American Society for Quality Deming Medal and the Seminal Contributions to Accounting Literature Award of the American Accounting Association. In 1996 Johnson's colleagues at Portland State Univeristy selected him for the Branford Price Millar Award for Faculty Excellence, the university's highest honor for research, service and teaching. Johnson came to PSU in 1988 as the first holder of the endowed Retzlaff Chair in Quality Management, which he held until 2001. He has an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard, an MBA from Rutgers, and a PhD in economic history from the University of Wisconsin. Before entering an academic career, he was employed as a CPA by Arthur Andersen & Co. Johnson is an internationally-noted authority on economic history, management accounting, quality management and operations management.
