Counting What Counts: Turning Corporate Accountability To Competitive Advantage

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 areas—governance, performance measurement, control systems, and reporting—and 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 loyalty—turning accountability into a competitive asset.

In this golden age of investment returns, we often think of corporate performance one way: Did it make enough money, or didn't it? But corporations themselves have stopped viewing performance by this one measure, according to Epstein, a long-time researcher, and Birchard, a financial journalist. Instead, companies view the bottom line a number of ways: customer loyalty, employee retention, and shareholder value. The pivot point for these performance measures is accountability, which the authors define as four variables: governance (how outside boards of directors affect the company's actions and strategies); measurement (gauges of a company's performance might include customer satisfaction and/or employee productivity, as well as profit and loss); management systems (how well a company links its long-term strategies with the day-to-day performance of its frontline employees); and reporting, which includes telling everyone who has a stake in the company (employees, customers, shareholders, prospective employees) important information about the company's performance--information that was once seen only by the company's top executives.

Counting What Counts is heavily researched and referenced, and as such will probably appeal more to academics and top managers than anyone else. But nearly everyone involved in corporate management will at least find a few real-world examples of how these principles in action can affect a company's future and its perception by the outside world. --Lou Schuler

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