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

~ (Author), Anders Broms (Author), Peter M. Senge (Foreword) "Managers of business organizations will find as a result reading this book that they can no longer accept without question the conventional wisdom that says..." (more)
Key Phrases: tracing indirect costs, natural living systems, profit map, World War, Big Three, North American (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

David S. Cochran, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering MIT Superbly written...Johnson provides tremendous insight regarding the re-direction that is needed in business management thinking. The effect of the approach on the design and engineering of manufacturing systems is profound. -- Review

Product Description

Waste has plagued almost every industrial-age firm for the past century. In this powerfully argued alternative to conventional cost management thinking, experts H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms assert that any company can avoid the waste that is generated through excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses from market instability in the long run. To gain more secure levels of profitability, management must simply change how it thinks about work and how it organizes work.

Profit Beyond Measure details how two extremely profitable manufacturers, Toyota and the Swedish truck maker Scania, have rejected the traditional mechanistic mindset of managing by results that generates waste. Johnson and Broms explain how Toyota and Scania achieve their legendary cost advantage through a revolutionary concept they call managing by means (MBM). Instead of being driven to meet preconceived accounting targets, the production systems of Toyota and Scania are governed by the three precepts that guide all living systems: self-organization, interdependence, and diversity.

Amid a wealth of new insights into Toyota's vaunted system, Johnson and Bröms introduce the tools of MBM to show how design, production, and profitability analysis are done to customer order. They demonstrate that by following the principles that emulate life systems, even a lean and profitable company can organize work to greatly lessen its long-term earnings instability and sharply reduce its short-run operating costs.

Scania has achieved sixty-five years of financial stability and longevity in the face of fierce competition. Toyota has amassed a market value since 1988 that has rivaled -- or sometimes surpassed -- the American "Big Three" automakers combined. The principles that Johnson and Bröms set forth in Profit Beyond Measure can guarantee the same richer, longer life to any company that applies them.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (November 6, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068483667X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684836676
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #364,201 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Book the Business World Has Been Waiting for, January 18, 2001

By	Thomas A. Coens (East Lansing, MI USA) - See all my reviews

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

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living systems applied, October 17, 2000

By	Jamie Flinchbaugh (Michigan USA) - See all my reviews

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!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 20th Century Manufacturing Illuminated, November 15, 2000

By	Mr. M. Jones "Malcolm Jones" (Olney, England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.