Biography: H. Thomas ("Tom") Johnson is Professor of Business Administration at Portland State University (Oregon). He was named one of the 200 leading management thinkers living today in a survey published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003. Winner of the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research in 2001 and 2007, Tom received in 2007 the American Accounting Association’s highest award for research, the Seminal Contribution to Accounting Literature Award, for his co-authored book Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Harvard Business School Press, 1987). His full bio is available at this link - www.sba.pdx.edu/faculty/tomj/tomj.htm.

Presentation Title: Manage the Means, Not the Ends, to Secure Satisfactory Long-term Business Performance

Abstract: All businesses desire high and stable profitability, period after period for as long as possible. However, most performance improvement initiatives achieve their desired result for only brief periods, a few years at best, followed by periods of increased instability and poor results. Professor Johnson explains how this unintended consequence of improvement initiatives occurs because managers fail to understand how their view of what causes business results differs greatly from how a business should naturally produce those results. He traces this management failure to the common and long-standing fallacy of believing that the linear quantitative language used, quite properly, to describe business results can also be used to explain and analyze the complex, non-linear process that produces those results. This fallacy causes managers to view quantitative results, or ends, as solid goals and to view process, or means, as ephemeral steps they manipulate in any way necessary to achieve their ends. Professor Johnson argues that businesses cannot achieve satisfactory long-term financial performance until managers accept the idea that financial results are achieved by nurturing the means according to principles like those scientists observe in natural systems. He will describe examples of such principles found in the science of modern evolutionary cosmology, in The Toyota Way, and in the management thinking of W. Edwards Deming.