Making the Numbers Count, Second Edition: The Accountant as Change Agent on the World-Class Team

The first edition of Brian Maskell’s now classic work proved that when given the chance, accountants would prefer not to serve out their working days as number crunching automatons. With its energetic tone and common sense approach, the book inspired numbers people at all levels to become true allies in their companies’ lean revolutions. It encouraged new directions for both management and financial accounting, and helped provide impetus for the lean accounting movement that continues to find adherents in companies small and large today.

With the second edition of Making the Numbers Count: The Accountant as Change Agent on the World-Class Team, Maskell once again shows that the accountant’s first responsibility during a lean implementation is not to simply read the conventional bottom-line profit-and-loss results, but measure and reflect the processes that influence the bottom line. Once released from the chains of the ledger, the accountant is then free to establish performance measures that make a difference, empower others throughout the company to create customer value, eliminate waste, improve processes, and participate in a truly lean organization that is flexible and responsive enough to function optimally in turbulent and unpredictable times.

In these pages, Maskell provides the rationale, approaches, and tools needed to embrace a companywide allegiance to lean principles and practices. The book is updated throughout to reflect recent advances. Notably, it eliminates activity-based costing and management (ABC/M) in favor of the much more expedient value-stream accounting methods that have been tried and tested in diverse companies over the last ten years.

Like lean itself, this book will teach you to throw out what’s wasteful and improve upon that which has value. In this way, it turns accountants who once merely followed into powerful leading change agents.