PSU Magazine Spring 2001

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flowere, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour." Amu ed blue eyes tum up from the page, and H. Thomas Johnson, profes– sor of business administration, says, "You still don't talk to busines people that way-most of them would blush." Perhaps. But talking to them that way is exactly what Johnson is doing in his latest book, Profit Beyond Mea– sure: Extraordinary Results through Attention to Work and People, co– authored with Anders Brom . The William Blake quote leads Chapter 6. Johnson raises more than a blush when he advocate doing away with college management accounting classes. In the bottom-line, button– down world of business, this makes John on a heretic or a visionary. But he started as one of the fa ithful. At Harvard, Rutgers, and the Uni– versity of Wisconsin at Madison, John– son earned degrees in economics, public accounting, and economic history. After a brief stint as a CPA, he began teach– ing in 1968. Twenty years later he j ined the PSU business faculty. Along the way Johnson virtually created a new field of inquiry, the his– tory of management accounting. In essence, management accounting means you run a business by looking at the bottom line. If profits go down, you cut somewhere-or someone. The evolution of management accounting in large companies from the Industrial Revolution to the present became Johnson's pecialty. In 1987 he and Robert Kaplan, dean of the business school of Carnegie-Mellon University, wrote Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting. Harvard 10 PSU MAGAZINE SPRING 2001