PROFESSOR ROBERT S. KAPLAN ELECTED TO ACCOUNTING HALL OF FAME

Professor Robert S. Kaplan

BOSTON - Robert S. Kaplan, Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), who has focused on linking cost and performance management systems to strategy implementation and operational excellence, has joined a select group of other distinguished experts from academia, practice, government, and business as a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame. Established in 1950 at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, the Accounting Hall of Fame now comprises 80 honorees chosen annually by the organization’s international board of electors.

An innovative researcher and prolific writer who has authored or coauthored more than a dozen books,16 Harvard Business Review articles, and over 125 papers published in academic and professional journals, Kaplan was lauded by the Accounting Hall of Fame as an “accounting scholar of international acclaim [who] has given new life to cost accounting and revitalized the role of accounting in business management and strategic planning.”

Kaplan, who has also recently received the Lifetime Contribution Award from the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association, is especially well known for co-developing activity-based costing and the Balanced Scorecard, projects he developed after joining the HBS faculty in 1984.

“Activity-based costing represented a new design for cost systems, one that allows the cost of common or shared resources—formerly called overhead—to be more accurately driven to the transactions, products, and customers served by these resources,” Kaplan explained. “It enabled relatively simple cost accounting systems to capture the economics of complex multi-product and multi-customer firms.”

Introduced in 1996, the Balanced Scorecard was a new design for performance measurement systems that enabled enterprises to describe, communicate, and implement their strategies by examining four integrated areas—financial performance, customer knowledge, internal processes, and learning and growth.

“Activity-based costing and the Balanced Scorecard provide evidence of the benefits from having academics develop close relationships with practice,” Kaplan said. “In this way, academics learn about the most important real problems, identify innovative practices that address the problems, and learn how to implement and sustain the practices in actual organizations.”

Among many previous honors, Kaplan has received the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award from the American Accounting Association, the CIMA Award from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK) for outstanding contributions to the accountancy profession, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Institute of Management Accountants for contributions to the academic community and practice.

His most recent book, Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing: A Simpler and More Powerful Path to Higher Profits, cowritten with Steven R. Anderson, will be published this spring by the Harvard Business School Press.

Kaplan holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. After earning a Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University, he spent 16 years on the business school faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University, where he served as Dean from 1977 to 1983.