Keynote:

The Means are the Ends in the Making: Finding the Natural Pathway to Robust, Stable Business Performance

All businesses desire high and stable profitability, period after period for as long as possible. However, most performance improvement initiatives achieve their desired result for only brief periods, a few years at best, followed by periods of increased instability and poor results.

Professor Johnson explains how this unintended consequence of improvement initiatives occurs because managers fail to understand how their view of what causes business results differs greatly from how a business should naturally produce those results. He traces this management failure to the common and long-standing fallacy of believing that the linear quantitative language used, quite properly, to describe business results can also be used to explain and analyze the complex, non-linear process that produces those results. This fallacy causes managers to view quantitative results, or ends, as solid goals and process, or means, as ephemeral steps they manipulate in any way necessary to achieve their ends. Professor Johnson argues that businesses will not achieve sustainable long-term financial performance until managers accept the idea that financial results are achieved by nurturing the means according to principles like those scientists observe in natural living systems. He will demonstrate how Toyota’s operations reflect this idea at work.

H. Thomas Johnson, PhD Biography
School of Business Administration
Portland State University


H. Thomas Johnson, Professor of Business Administration at Portland State University, was named one of the 200 leading management thinkers living today in a survey published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003. Johnson came to PSU in 1988 as the first holder of the endowed Retzlaff Chair in Quality Management. In 1996 Johnson's colleagues at PSU selected him for the Branford Price Millar Award for Faculty Excellence, the university's highest honor for research, service and teaching. He has an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard, an MBA from Rutgers, and a PhD in economic history from the University of Wisconsin. Before entering an academic career, he was employed as a CPA by Arthur Andersen & Co.
Johnson is an internationally-noted authority on economic history, management accounting, and quality management. Author of seven books and over 100 articles and reviews on these subjects, Johnson has received many honors for his publications, including Harvard Business School's Newcomen Award in Business History, National Association of Accountants' Lybrand Medal, and the American Accounting Association's Wildman Gold Medal. His co-authored book Profit Beyond Measure: Extraordinary Results through Attention to Work and People (The Free Press, 2000), received the 2001 Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research. His best-selling Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Harvard Business School Press, 1987 and 1991), co-authored with Robert S. Kaplan, was named by Harvard Business Review in 1997 as one of the most influential management books published in the twentieth century. His controversial and internationally-acclaimed sequel to that book was Relevance Regained: From Top-Down Control to Bottom-Up Empowerment (The Free Press, 1992). His books have appeared in eight languages.

Among his many high-level professional and academic appointments, Professor Johnson is a past-President of The Academy of Accounting Historians and he has served on the editorial boards of over a dozen major professional journals, including Accounting Review, Business History Review, International Journal of Strategic Cost Management, Journal of Cost Management and Quality Management Journal. He was the Towne Lecturer to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1993, the Distinguished International Lecturer of the British Accounting Association in 1996 and the 2002 Invited Lecturer in Business at Uppsala University in Sweden. He has served on several boards including the Oregon Quality Award Board of Overseers, the USA TODAY Quality Cup Judges Board, the Procter & Gamble Quality Forum, the Production System Council of Visteon Corporation, the Lean Manufacturing Oversight Technical Committee of Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), and the Advisory Board of Maxager Technology, Inc. He has been active in the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and the Society for Organizational Learning.

Since the mid-1980s Johnson has given hundreds of presentations and workshops to corporate, professional, and academic audiences around the world in scores of major organizations, including Alcoa, AICPA, APICS, Arthur Andersen & Co., Association for Manufacturing Excellence, ATK Thiokol Propulsion, BDO Scan/Futura (Denmark), Boeing, British Petroleum, Chrysler, Consultique (South Africa), The Deming Institute, Ericsson Telefon, Ernst & Young, Ford Motor Company, Institute of Industrial Engineers, Institute of Management Accountants, Intel, Japanese Production and Inventory Control Society, National Bureau of Economic Research, The Ohio Productivity and Quality Forum, Pacific Bell, Pegasus Communications, Scania (Sweden), Schneider Electric (France), Schlumberger (France), Scott Paper, Skandia (Sweden), Society for Organizational Learning, Sprint, Studio Ambrosetti (Italy), TeleNord (Norway), Toyota Motor Manufacturing USA, Visteon Corporation, Volvo, Weyerhaeuser, and The World Bank.

His current research focuses on the intersection of systems thinking, modern life science, and sustainability operations management. He is exploring the application of natural living system principles to the design of sustainability-focused local business operations that emulate and extend the scope of the Toyota Production System.

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