A comprehensive and practical approach for turning corporate accountability into a competitive asset.. Who can deny the failures in corporate accountability? From questionable earnings reporting to outright fraud, businesses are coming under increasing scrutiny from shareholders and regulators alike. As Epstein and Birchard demonstrate in Counting What Counts, these practices prevent managers from successfully executing strategy and condemn companies to a purgatory of sub-par performance; by contrast, managers embracing the principles of accountable management can become responsive and responsible like never before. Drawing from the personal stories of dozens of managers, and from the collective experience of 25 years of research, writing, and teaching, the authors show that managers routinely tolerate shortfalls in four areasgovernance, performance measurement, control systems, and reportingand outline a practical approach to reforming and invigorating these essential drivers to improve decision making, clarify and communicate strategy, accelerate feedback and learning, and secure stakeholder loyaltyturning accountability into a competitive asset.
Count What Counts...and WinHi, I'm Bill Birchard, co-author of Counting What Counts. You'll find our You'll also find that a lot of chief executives we interviewed for the book -- from Nortel Networks, DuPont, Allstate, United HealthCare, and so on -- tell interesting stories about building accountable organizations.
The main idea behind our book is simple. The way to get the most out of big groups of people is to measure their performance with numbers. What numbers? About profits, costs, quality, speed, employee satisfaction, pollution control -- all the things that make a company great.
Numbers can distort performance in a thousand ways. But when you're working with an organization, you can't run it by gut feel. You have to run it with facts, and facts best reduce to numbers, especially in business.
Our other big idea is that you can get the most out of numbers by reporting them to everyone who helps the company deliver value. You shouldn't hide the numbers in a closed database. You should show them off -- make a public commitment to them.
By measuring with numbers, and putting them on display, you build two key elements of accountability into your organization -- and lay a cornerstone for sustainable success.
The magic of numbers is that they are a clear gauge for objective appraisals. And everyone needs an objective appraisal. How much time each day do we all spend trying to strip the spin from other people's data. All the while we're thinking, "Please, just the facts!"
The magic of reporting is that it makes an organization face an omniscient, skeptical judge. There's nothing like an outside judge to galvanize our commitment to honest feedback.
Honest accounting. Honest feedback. What could be more critical to running an ever-better organization? Not much. Because with them you get the fundamental ingredients for driving prosperity, good years every nuance of business with numbers. But quantifying financial, operational, and social performance will enable you to achieve a singular stakeholders. The route to rewarding the owners of a company, long term, is to look out for the constituencies that collaborate to create those rewards. When customers win, when employees win, when communities win, only then do stockholders share in the residual winnings -- the profits from outstanding value delivered.
You don't have to take our word for it. Check out the comments from dozens of managers quoted in our book. Or read an excerpt on our website. And enjoy!
