Customer Reviews

Profit Beyond Measure: Extraordinary Results through Attention to Work and People

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Since the day Amazon delivered my copy of Johnson and Broms' Profit Beyond Measure,I have taken delight with every page. This book is a wonderfully brilliant, masterful book that may be the serious business book of this decade in the way Senge's Fifth Discipline was for the 1990's. Insightful writers such as Margeret Wheatley and Danah Zohar have artfully open our eyes to the potential of viewing organizations as naturally evolving living systems. Notwithstanding their powerful insights, the actual application of these ideas left a lot to the imagination as to how they would actually be applied. Johnson and Broms, however, provide the substance and put the meat on the bones of the many complexity and chaos theory books available today. Johnson and Broms tell us with precision and in entaintaining detail the stories of Toyota and Scania Truck and how, respectively, they have gone forty and sixty-sixty years without losing money---how, they manage by means, as part of living systems, not trying to orchestrate management by the results (a notion of believing that you can fix future events to happen within a management plan) as America's Big 3 auto companies have over the past century. Johnson and Broms take us inside of the Toyota and Scania plants and board rooms, helping us see how they produce only according to actual orders, how they design and set up assembly and modulated processes to avoid waste (not eliminate it, avoid it in the first place!), how they treat their employees, how they see customers and market and more. Drawing from the principles articulated by Gregory Bateson, Johnson and Bohms help us see the unique milieu and overriding philosophy and work culture that is reflective of an open, living system, that relies on "balanced, cyclical patterns of continuous flow of the work for every person in the organization." Before reading this book, I only had a vague notions of how chaos, complexity, and new science theories applied to the emerging organizations of today. As a result of reading this book, however, I believe I now can grasp what it means, in real and substantive terms, for an organization to exist, evolve, and succeed as part of living system. This is a book for the new century. Every business can learn from this book and those that don' will perish while Toyota, Scania, and others of this fabric will thrive in our increasingly complex and interdependent world. I recommend this book to any one interested in business theory, organizational development, or building a better organization. Tom Coens

Tom Johnson's new book could be just as impactful as Relevance Lost. His close study of perhaps the most powerful and robust company on the planet, Toyota, exposes what others don't see. Toyota is perhaps the most studied and imitated company, and not just by the other autos. Many people look for that one missing link that others don't see. Others have seen it, but few have articulated it as well as Johnson.

If you resort to curtailing travel and eliminating donuts to try and make budget, or think lean is a material control system, or simply feel that their current patterns of management will never get you where you need to go, you should read this book. Through the attention and cultivation of the work and relationships of the business and not just the measurement results you will find many disconnects in how you are serving your customers. The work of the organization carries all of the information you need with it, and while output measures are important for reporting reasons, they are not helping you to design a system that connects workers to customers. This can help.

I predict this book and not Relevance Lost will be considered Johnson greatest contribution. Enjoy!

For manufacturers the 20th century was the story of Ford and Toyota. The story of the transition from mass production to lean production has been told many times, but often focusing on the techniques, not the strategy. Professor Johnson has developed a profound insight into the strategy behind Toyota's approach, framed as management by means, rather than management by results.

This is the most important insight into the Toyota Production System which has come my way in the last ten years. Johnson demonstrates why the Toyota Management by Means approach gives superior long term value to customers, shareholders and employees.

Profit without Measure is essential reading for any manufacturer building a strategy for World Class Manufacturing.

I've always found the notion that businesses should 'maximise profit' to be naive, but to come up with a better business rationale seems to get real messy, quickly.

This book uses some concepts that moved me when I read Fritjof Capra's 'The Web of Life', and applies them to effectively and realistically running a business in a competitive environment.

In integrating living systems concepts with management control issues, this is the most philosophically thoughtful book I've seen written by someone who understands accounting.

Comments on Profit Beyond Measure by Tom Johnson:

Tom Johnson's overview of business thinking is astoundingly clear, the beginning of the revolution that Dr. W. Edwards Deming demanded for so many years.

The Toyota story is told beautifully in chapter 3; now I begin to understand what happens in that Kentucky facility.

Chapter 4 is the weakness of the book; there is no there there. The Scania "secret" is not in the same universe as that at Toyota. What more evidence do we need than the sale of the company?

Chapter 5 is fascinating. Tom Johnson the heretic! A modern day Martin Luther! No one on Wall Street will want to know about orderline analysis. However, if those using it prosper...

The stock market vanish? That is precisely what will happen if Tom Johnson's thinking catches on. And that can't happen too soon. It may already be too late to preserve our culture as we know it. But then, it may be time.

Most in business will not want to hear the last two chapters. But no one wants to hear that they have cancer either, right? This patient (the world economy) has cancer, and no one knows if survival is possible.

I can't wait for the next iteration of this "stuff." The books that Johnson (and a few others, like Dr. Ed Baker) are going to write could make all the difference in our future. Dr. Norman Borlaug and his cohorts are trying to feed the world in spite of potentially deadly water shortages; Johnson and a few like-minded intellectuals are trying to feed the world correct thinking in spite of potentially deadly shortsightedness.

History demonstrates that companies pay a high price for putting the pursuit of quantitative financial goals ahead of genuine learning, according to Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms in this book. Rather than destructively trying to squeeze higher profits out of the system, management's main job should be to learn exactly what people do in their jobs and how they can be helped to improve the system's capability to serve the needs of customers.

The authors describe in detail two examples which illustrate their thesis. Toyota delivered superior results in its vehicle manufacturing year after year because of its management approach which focused on creating an efficient system with minimised waste and downtime when its less successful competitors were focusing on numbers and results instead of optimising the system. Scania adopted a design process which allowed individual trucks to be tailored to meet customers' needs while ensuring low costs, never sacrificing design principles to achieve short-term financial targets.

Management accounting is roundly criticised in the book; instead the authors advocate order-line profitability analysis. Typical profit-driven management is described by the authors as "management by results", and in its place they advocate "management by means", which involves treating the organisation like a living system of interdependent parts rather than as a machine in which the separate parts can be analysed mechanistically.

The book is more a passionately worded manifesto than a detailed research project. Nonetheless there is a ring of truth to much of what the authors assert. Many companies are very poorly managed, and it is foolish to think that profitability can be improved by concentrating on numbers without devising ways of improving systems underlying a business. Nonetheless this is a book which is fated to be left to one side by the majority of managers who are really more interested in quick ways of improving the next quarter's figures rather than patiently nurturing relationships and waiting for results to unfold.

I can't rate this book highly enough, it demonstrates the link between thinking, measuring the means (of production or service) and bottom line success.

It provided me with plenty of ideas which I found useful when influencing my business colleagues.

Drop this onto your CFO's Desk.

From my blog(which is why it is written this way)

I finished reading "Profit Beyond Measure" subtitled "Extraordinary Results through Attention to Work and People" by Johnson and Broms. Good book. I have learned many things at SYNNEX. One of the great learnings is attention to detailed numbers and cost accounting. This has tremendous value and the SYNNEX system is truly awesome on granular numbers. This book reinforces the need for good cost accounting systems as long as they are logical. A lot of the book is about having the right systems. As a Systems Design Engineer, I really appreciate the books attention to systems and interdependence. Part of the problem with measuring is that interrelations are often overlooked.

A part of me at times feels that sometimes we are not totally on the right track though. Profit Beyond Measure reinforces what I already know about intuition. It will help me hold firm in areas where I know in my heart we are right to change (or not). Some of it comes back to my continual short term vs. long term dilemma.


Jim Estill CEO - SYNNEX Canada