Profit Beyond Measure

By Thomas Johnson and Anders BrØms

The Free Press, 2000,

256 pages, $30.00

Profit Beyond Measure by H. Thomas Johnson and Anders BrØ ms is a book that one wants to like. Johnson is Retzlaff Professor of Quality Management at Portland State University and was co-author in 1987 of Relevance Lost, a seminal book on cost accounting. BrØ m is a Swedish management consultant with deep insights into the workings of Scania, the most profitable maker of trucks in the world. Between the two of them they take on the all-too prevalent, top-down driven system of management-by-results (MBR) and argue that it should be replaced by what they call ‘management by means’ (MBM). They use Scania’s example of modular manufacturing and line order costing together with the workings of the much more familiar Toyota Production System to show how these successful organizations manage by means rather than by ends. And they make a compelling case that, through a single-minded focus on results, managers can become preoccupied with financial abstractions at the expense of the relationships between people and things that produce those results. So far, so good. The authors go on to contend, however, that natural, living systems also ‘use’ MBM and that business organizations would do well to emulate them. At this stage the book becomes less convincing. There may well be a connection between natural systems and effective organizations, but this book will not persuade you of it. The authors make excessive use of the thinking of the late Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist-turned-systems-thinker, whose ideas are not easily accessible to lay readers. Living systems concepts such as ‘self-organization,’ ‘interdependence’ and ‘diversity,’ even though delivered with a born-again fervor, come across as too abstract. In the final analysis Profit Beyond Measure is not sympathetic enough to its target audience – readers who are currently managing by results and want to change.