Customer Reviews

Making the Numbers Count: The Management Accountant as Change Agent (Corporate Leadership)

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This is a modern and fresh look at accounting the way it should be. When the universities start teaching this to our future accountants we may once again lead the world at our own game.

Maskell takes a baseball bat to the Accounting Bee Hive with a call to ACTION for Accounting to become an integral part of the transformation of their business.

Concise, with clear steps to creating an improvement plan, the book is meant to start a dialogue among the Accounting community that will inevitably lead to a fundamental shift in how Accountants see their role in the organization. "Traditional Management Accounting is irrelevant at best," is enough to wake up even the stauchest dyed-in-the-Wool Cost Accountants and start them on a path to looking forward in the organization instead of focusing on past results.

Maskell makes the case that typical cost account managers currently waste their financial knowledge tallying irrelevant columns of numbers and complying with narrow governmental regulations. He then details how they can provide critical business information to help managers make daily operational decisions (hence the book's title). Agile companies understand that this is definitely not an esoteric topic (despite only 2 reviews in 6 years). Business leaders who undertake the transformation of their accounting departments can realize a big competitive advantage. You can spot such evolved companies when their accounting books no longer represent inventory as an asset and developing employees as a liability.