Title: Management Accountant - Scorekeeper

Age: 69

Sun Sign: Capricorn

Chinese Sign: Earth Rabbit

Location: New York, NY

Thanks for organizing this space.  I hope that I will prove to be a useful member. And thanks to Chris Macrae for making sure that I join in.

I do not subscribe to the idea that I can change the world … at any event, not by myself. Rather, I think in terms of the system needed for change, and beyond thatm the information that is needed in the system so that the system produces valuable results.

In an early and quite successful corporate career I did not make decisions … just did the measuring and produced the reports that showed performance, and made it pretty clear what decisions had produced the good results and what decisions had made the poor results … and we linked decision to people. We called this, back in the 1960s and 1970s … “Responsibility Accounting” … and while it was not popular, it was very very effective.

The Transparency and Accountability Network is setting the stage to do this in the relief and development sector … where average performance is dismal …. but some of the work is brilliant and  much of the work is awful … and because there is no management information, funds still flow to unproductive activities rather than being concentrated in the areas of great performance. 

We celebrate the icons of history … but it was their impact on masses of people that made them valuable … it was not the person that made these icons, but their ideas and how these ideas were embraced by masses of people … and changed history. My dream is that management information can change the way the economy functions at the bottom of the pyramid … and how management information can stop the top-down abuse that makes the bottom of the pyramid  such a socio-economic disaster.

Sincerely

Peter Burgess
http://www.tr-ac-net.org/

Member Since: Friday, August 17 2007

Last Visit: 522 days ago.

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