Managing in a Time of Great Change

CHAPTER ELEVEN

We Need to Measure, Not Count

QUANTIFICATION HAS BEEN THE RAGE in business and economics these past fifty years. Accountants have proliferated as fast as lawyers. Yet we do not have the measurements we need.

Neither our concepts nor our tools are adequate for the control of operations or for managerial control. And, so far, there are neither the concepts nor the tools for business control—that is, for economic decision making. In the past few years, however, we have become increasingly aware of the need for such measurements. And in one area, the operational control of manufacturing, the needed work has actually been done.

Traditional cost accounting in manufacturing—now seventy-five years old—does not record the cost of nonproducing, ...