Who's Counting?, authored by Jerome M. Solomon, is another "business novel" that follows the formula: new manager in a tough spot to implement lean before he or she gets the rug pulled out from under him/her.  As always, there's somebody hindering the lean efforts and a boss that a.) supports the lean efforts but b.) is ready to fire the manager if the lean efforts don't work.  This one does manage to avoid the extraneous love-life/failing marriage material that afflicts too many other such novels.

The novel follows Michael as he seeks to implement lean manufacturing at a medium-sized, publicly owned manufacturing firm.  The story uses lean accounting as its point of entry to the lean implementation.  (Michael was an accountant but switched to operations sometime in the past.)  At first, Michael's style irks just about everybody, especially CFO Fred.  He uses the term muda a lot, which would get me pretty irked, too.  More to the point, he pushes substantial and comprehensive changes to the firm's cost accounting as it proceeds on its lean journey.  Fred is a barrier, then Fred is a friend, the Board is upset, then the Board is mollified, and we can guess how it all ends.

I'm a psychologist, so the whole thing about cost accounting and lean has always escaped me.  This book was of help to me but I think it would be especially useful for managers who already understood the concepts and language of cost accounting.  Through a series of conversations among the various characters, one gets a good feel for the tension between traditional and lean cost accounting and the sources of that tension. 

The novel speaks most directly to cost accounting in a publicly owned company.  Much of the plot tension (such as it is) revolves around the firm's anxiety as to how the Board and investors will respond to apparent financial results.  For example, the book addresses the old bugaboo about the apparent hit the books take when inventories are reduced.  As I said, I'm a psychologist, so this is completely counterintuitive to me.  When I've asked the owners of small firms I work with about this, their response is, "Yeah, but who cares?  Inventory is bad.  Cash is good.  Everybody knows that."  Managers from smaller companies may find some of the scenarios much ado about nothing.  (I'm going to get one of my small company owner friends to read it and get his input.  I'll update you on his response.)

The book does a good job of explaining how and why lean accounting is so very different from traditional cost accounting, especially with respect to accounting for direct labor and absorption.  Again, I think it would be easier for an experienced operating or accounting manager to follow the argument than it was for me.  I think I'm going to need to read it again to really understand it.  But it's as good a presentation of this material as I've seen.

Overall, I liked the book and recommend it.  You won't learn a thing about tools here, but the book doesn't really promise that you will.  You will get a good comparison and contrast of the two approaches to accounting.  I'll leave it for smarter readers to decide whether it provides a good roadmap to making the transition from traditional  to lean cost accounting.  There are probably one too many conversations between Fred and Michael that are simply two guys who don't like each other much (at first) taking pokes at each other.  There's a chapter on changes that need to be made to IT systems that could be another book unto itself, which is to say that it tries to pack too much info into too small a space. And one could argue whether the business novel format is the best way to cover this material.   It does a good job, though, of laying out the basic picture of lean accounting and is worth the read because of that.