Gary Cokins

Gary Cokins, CPIM

(gcokins@garycokins.com;  phone 919 720 2718)

http://www.garycokins.com 

Gary Cokins (Cornell University BS industrial engineering/operations research) 1971; Northwestern University Kellogg MBA 1974) is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) systems. He is the founder of Analytics-Based Performance Management LLC www.garycokins.com .  He began his career in industry with a Fortune 100 company in CFO and operations roles. Then 15 years in consulting with Deloitte, KPMG, and EDS (now part of HP). From 1997 until 2013 Gary was a Principal Consultant with SAS, a business analytics software vendor. His most recent books are Performance Management: Integrating Strategy Execution, Methodologies, Risk, and Analytics and Predictive Business Analytics.

All of my books are at:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/47692.Gary_Cokins

Linkedin.com contact:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/garycokins

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gary-cokins/0/15a/949

https://garycokins.academia.edu/

Twitter:

@GaryCokins

16. Beethoven’s ‘Eroica Effect’ and Corporate Performance Management (CPM)

15. The Strategic Cost of Quality

14. Measuring and managing patient profitability

13. Are Accountants Homo Accounticus?

12. Management Accounting 101, 102 and 103 Courses

11. Identifying and Measuring the Cost of Error and Waste 

10. Why Use ABC

9. Movie Sequel – “Accountant Pirates of the Caribbean”

8. Some Accountants are the Blind Leading the Blind

7. The CFO’s Expanding Role – Reality or Delusion?

6. How Many Types of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are There?

5. Does Accounting Undermine Managers' Ability to Make Good Decisions?

4. A Passionate Appeal for Activity-Based Costing (ABC)

3. Put Your Money Where Your Strategy Is

2. How Marketing and Finance Think differently

1. Measuring and managing customer profitability

I was educated as an industrial engineer. Engineers are not perceived as very worldly or sophisticated. They are often pictured with a shirt-pocket protector stuffed with pens. But some engineers, like me, do have appreciation for the performing arts. For example, I appreciate classical music. In particular, I admire and am in awe of the great classical music composers. How did Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn transcribe such beautiful music as notes from their brain to a page of musical score for so many instruments? (Hint: I don’t think they had a smartphone or email to distract them.)

I believe that in the next few years the adoption rate for corporate performance management (CPM) methods (as I have been broadly defining it) will accelerate and have an effect similar to the one Ludwig van Beethoven’s masterpiece – his third symphony, Eroica – had on the future of classical music. Beethoven followed Eroica with his universally memorable fourth to ninth symphonies, and other great composers emulated him. What connection am I making between classical music and corporate performance management (CPM) methods?

Breaking free from tradition

Ever hear much about Beethoven’s first or second symphony? Few people have. That is because it was with Eroica, his third symphony, where Beethoven himself is quoted as saying, “I will now take a new path.” It was a radical change in music composition.

Eroica, inspired by Beethoven’s admiration for Napoleon as a world leader, had true melody. Prior to Eroica, Beethoven’s compositions followed a tradition where melody was rare. He complied with the conventional rules of what tasteful music for the elite should sound like. His prior music was influenced by masters who dared not change from tradition, such as Bach and Haydn. But Beethoven had a strong urge to break free from tradition. With Eroica, classical music was changed forever.

The evidence of the “Eroica effect” is this: How many billions of people, including you and me, will die with little trace of remembrance generations from now but a tombstone? But the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Rossini, Sibelius, Grieg and others in their league will be listened to for a long time to come.

Are we now at a point where the implementation of corporate performance management (CPM)’s suite of integrated methods, like Eroica, will also “take a new path?” Yes – because tradition increasingly gives way to change, and organizations are slowly and gradually learning to not just manage change but drive it.

The future of performance management

People are what it’s all about, so I honor and respect the importance of applying the principles of behavioral change management. However, my love for quantitative analysis influences me to conclude with a short narration by the great Princeton University mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Nash. Nash introduced a theory describing how rational human beings should behave if there is a conflict of interest. In the Academy Award-winning movie about Nash’s life, A Beautiful Mind, he said:

The executive management team and its board of directors need to inspire their accountants to be more progressive and experience that “mindset change” referenced earlier.

John Nash, in the same movie, A Beautiful Mind, said:

“I like numbers because with numbers truth and beauty are the same thing. You know you are getting somewhere when the equations start looking beautiful. And you know that the numbers are taking you closer to the secret of how things are.”

The executive management teams with the courage, will, caring attitude, and leadership skills will shift their organization’s management accounting practices from the status quo to progressive practices. They will narrow, and ideally close, the gap between what accountants provide with management accounting information and what their users – strategic and operations managers – need for insights to make better decisions. They will likely be the initial adopters of a fully integrated analytics-based enterprise performance management system and will achieve its full vision. Other executive management teams will follow them.

Gary Cokins

Carlo Attademo

Quality!? 

How many times we hear of this word and the related concepts and standards needed to be met in order to be certified as an ISO 9000 (and following…) organization.

But are we sure about the meaning of Quality? 

Are we sure about its strategic importance for a company to be profitable? 

The former question involves some considerations about how we are accustomed to perceiving quality.

Most of us take it as a concept strictly linked to the high performance of making  products and delivering services with reference to the processes to make and deliver them.

It looks like only the business pursuing a Differentiation strategy would embrace the quality concept.

It isn’t always this way.

Quality is the ability of an organization to arrange all of its internal processes and to make all of its products/services to meet (at a minimum) the expectations of its customers. 

That means that even a firm adopting a low-cost strategy can also embed the quality concept into its processes and products/services.

 Last but not least, the firms nowadays are being affected by aggressive competitors to increase the quality standards of their products/services and lower their costs, thus adopting as a result a mixed strategy.

That means that it’s even more insightful how this subject is “across-the-board”.

The second question about the Profitabilty?  

You can find the full article in the file attached below

Gary Cokins

Christie Scanlon

Activity-based costing is an imperative for health systems seeking to ensure the profitability of their enterprises under value-focused health care.

U.S. healthcare providers are under tremendous pressure today—both from the government and from commercial health plans—to deliver value. This pressure is a consequence of today’s dramatic transition away from the nation’s long-standing revenue-driven healthcare system and its often-irrational pricing. To respond effectively, hospital and health system leaders require intelligence and creativity to manage their expenses and make fine-tuned investments of time and resources that will ensure success in a fee-for-value world.

An essential goal of the transformation is to create incentives for providers to deliver value for patients in the form of high-quality services delivered at the lowest possible cost, with sensitivity to the patient experience........

The full article is available in the file attached below

Previously published on www.hfma.org