On the pathetic status of Management Accounting.

I realise the value of a management accounting course in MBA programs as well as the value of hands-on experience in industry.

I started my career as an industrial engineer doing what are really cost management tasks, and later when I entered accounting academia taught mostly management accounting topics for the first five years. The time period  between my time in industrial engineering (1968-72) and accounting academia (1977-) was a transformative period for management accounting. 

First, all illusions of accounting in a manufacturing environment just about disappeared  from management accounting except for a lot of hand-waving about manufacturing. When I entered industry cost accounting was a very new term (it used to be referred to earlier as Factory Accounts, a relic of classic British understatement). Collateral to this was the dumping by management accounting of all aspects of factory accounts, such as cost engineering & estimation, project management, inventory management, and all accounting aspects of operations management,... These were precisely the  parts that were grabbed by industrial engineering. This transition was already underway when I started my career in industrial engineering. Those days I was happy because my then chosen avocation was becoming more attractive. Now I feel more ambivalent because the accountants lost important skills.

Second, management became a superficially scholarly field. Outright plagiarisation (I say so because it is questionable if the work shed any new light on our domain enough to impact practice)  of work in Economics on principal-agent models and statisticians' models of decision-making under uncertainty  did not really hold our interest except for a fleeting moment in history.

Third, we gave up modeling as a way of studying the property of operational systems. With this went the idea of rigour in  representation and careful attention to assumptions. We substituted them with impressive vocabulary. Since such modeling is the staple of engineering disciplines, they moved into what was traditionally our domain. Today, the most rigorous courses in cost/management accounting are to be found in engineering and not accounting. You put an industrial engineer even in a service operation and (s)he can be productive very quickly. On the other hand you put an accountant in a manufacturing environment and (s)he will quit in frustration soon.

Fourth, we moved our attentions up Bob Anthony's hierarchy from operational to management controls to finally strategic control. In this progression we also ascended to stratosphere in terms of vocabulary but not in the relevance to practice.

Today, if I were running any enterprise and had to hire a cost accountant I would any day prefer to hire an engineer with a good appreciation of costing rather than an accounting with less than rudimentary appreciation of engineering. 

On banned Ted Talks.

Rupert Sheldrake is a biochemist, cell-biologist, and a plant physiologist. A past don at Cambridge, he is a Darwinist. I would not write him off lightly as some probably would.

True, there is some skepticism in science but probably not as much for its own good these days. And there is a tendency to make fun of anything not in conformity with "accepted" "scientific" theology. Perhaps science has become far too arrogant for its own good? As Sheldrake has observed,

"The idea came to me in a moment of insight and was extremely exciting. It interested some of my colleagues at Clare College – philosophers, linguists, and classicists were quite open-minded. But the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species didn't go down too well with my colleagues in the science labs. Not that they were aggressively hostile; they just made fun of it. Whenever I said something like, "I've just got to go and make a telephone call," they said, "Ha, ha, why bother? Do it by morphic resonance!." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake).

 The problem is not that science has not claimed that it is imperfect, but that it often behaves as if only it already has the answers to any questions that can be asked. That is religion, not science. There was a time when science believed in flat earth or that humans are only a few thousand years old. And those who challenged the existing paradigm were condemned as heretics.

All scientists in history have had to cope with making peace between science and the possibility of phenomena that the existing stock of scientific knowledge is unable to explain. Newton believed in a monotheistic God who created everything. But when he seriously considered dropping out of studies to avoid ordination required for graduation. Fortunately for him, the statute was changed to provide dispensation from that duty. In his tome, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Netwon wrote:

"When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more then to find it usefull for that purpose." 

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_religious_views).

Scientists such as Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, have made a different bargains for themselves. The main difference is that it was far more difficult in the old days to say something that would be regarded heretical. We should not make it difficult more difficult today for some one to say something that the scientists consider heretical, without compromising on the requirements of evidence (or proof).

I am not surprised that TED banned this talk simply because its allowing it publicity would be like some one publicizing Galileo when the church was against it. TED also has banned many other talks, including one by Nick Hanauer, a billionaire advocating higher taxes for the rich, one by Sarah Silverman for expressing a plan to adopt a retarded terminal baby, and Graham Hancock's talk about the transformative impact of the drug ayahuasca on him.

As long as the talk does not insult  one's intelligence or create social disorder I do not see why TED should ban any talk.