Transcript

I suppose, you know, the other part that was great about Harvard Business School—which was just starting when I got here, and I would not have any idea, therefore, of the impact—was the revitalization of the Publishing Division. And that played a really critical role there.

And I can still remember the first year I was at the School, in 1983, the senior editor, Barbara Ankeny, was wandering around to find out what faculty members did. And so I handed her some of my recent articles about the change. Barbara came back the next day and she said, wow, she really found this interesting and fun. And I said, "Barbara, look, accountants don't have a sense of humor here, so don't tell me that." [Laughs] She's like, "No, this is really—it was interesting. Did you ever think of writing a book?"

I said, "A book?" I said, "I don't do books. I do articles." She said, "No, you can think about a book." And I said, "Well, that's interesting. No referees. I have the freedom to say what I want, how I want to say it."

And that led to a book called Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, where, collaborating with an accounting historian, we were able to document how accounting in organizations had really calcified and become rigid, and was not adapting to their changed environment. And that book was really somewhat revolutionary, in my thinking, because it had a big impact, and people seemed to know this; were writing to me, writing about it. And I could see that I had really tapped into something important.