Portland State Magazine Spring 2008

Prized for business innovation TOYOTA IS THE ONE globally suc– cessful business char H. Thomas Johnson chinks all U.S. companies should emu– late. Thar idea, and the reasoning behind it, has earned the PSU accounting professor international awards, including the Deming Medal from the American Society for Quality. According ro Johnson, instead of being driven co meet preconceived financial targets, Toyota's chief concern is co nurture the relationships connect– ing its employees, customers, suppliers, and rhe communities they inhabit. The Deming Medal comes on rhe heels of an award for Johnson's book Relevance Lost: The Rise and FaLL of Management Accounting, co-auchored with Robert Kaplan. The book received an American Accounting Association Seminal Conrribmion co Accounting Literature award---one of five ever given. Johnson, who has caught at Portland Scare since 1988, is also a two-rime recipient of cl1e prestigious Shingo Research Prize for Excellence in Manu– facturing. He was named one of the 200 leading management thinkers living today in a survey published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003. ■ ,,. Viewpoint: Do company green reports matter? School of Business Administration faculty Darrell Brown and Score Marshall are studying why corporations disclose their environmental policies, even though it is nor required by law. Having looked at company repor~s and. 10-K filings for the past six years, me professors are presentmg their findmgs at a Global Reporting Initiative conference in Amsterdam in May. Brown shares their research. Q: What kind of voluntary environmental information are corporations providing? A: The disclosures range widely, from green– house gas emissions co hours of employee environmental training co whether a company has a sustainability director. Q: How do companies benefit by revealing these faces? A: We found char investors in companies char disclosed more environmental informa– tion, demanded slighrly lower returns than investors in companies char disclosed less. Q : What does rhe consumer gee our of it? A: Actually, it is investors who benefit by having a better understanding of how a business operates. I do nor like co speculate, Darrell Brown, a professor of accounting in the School of Busi– ness Administration, studies com– pany environmental disclosures. bur it is possible char investors find chat a willingness co provide voluntary environmental disclosure is a signal of good management. Accounting Prof. H.Thomas Johnson recently won the pres– tigious Deming Medal. SPRING 2008 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 5