Metro Detroit Chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants sponsors a 6-CPE hour event titled Leadership Accounting: Driving Economic Value for Your Organization, presented by five leading Performance Management thought leaders

Date:       March 18, 2010    
Location: Crowne Plaza Hotel adjacent to Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus, Michigan
Time:      9:00am until 4:00pm.
Fee:       $110 for IMA members and $125 for non-members

 Register at IMA Chapter   Select March 18 on calendar

The speakers include:

•    Doug Hicks,Independant Thought Leader, Consultant and PCS Consulting Partner,
•    Jeff Thomson, President and CEO of the Institute of Management Accountants,
•    Jim Huntzinger, President and Founder of The Lean Accounting Summit,
•    Gary Cokins, Global Product Marketing Manager for Performance Management at SAS Institute,
•    Ravi Nayar, Vice President Business Strategy and IT Consulting at Accretive Solutions.

The theme of the event was prompted by the following paragraph from Gary Cokins’ recent book Performance Management: Integrating Strategy, Execution, Methodologies, Risk, and Analytics: “Management and leadership are not the same thing. Management copes with complexity, relying on budgets, plans, targets, and organizational charts.  Managers tend to follow rules and are risk adverse. In contrast, leaders cope with change – change that is accelerating.  Leadership requires vision, direction-setting, inspiring employees, and intelligent risk management.”

The session is comprised of the following five presentations followed by an open forum where speakers and attendees can discuss the concept of “leadership accounting” and the challenges faced by management accountants as they strive to drive economic value for their organizations:

Creating Value through Values: A Leadership Priority
Jeff Thomson – President and CEO, Institute of Management Accountants

The cornerstone of IMA’s business strategy is to drive sustainable value to members through certification and education in the areas of risk management, internal controls decision support, and more. But the leadership challenge – a priority, in fact – is to ensure that a culture of respect, integrity and innovation serve as guideposts and table stakes to achieving the end game: enhanced careers, transformations in organizational performance, and, stronger economies driven by sustainable value.

Accounting for the Right Reasons: Leadership by Learning
Jim Huntzinger – Founder and President of the Lean Accounting Summit

Accounting for Lean is the design, execution and continual improvement of the operation (production, service, or information), and is at the core of managerial accounting in the framework of a lean business model. A walk through the actual events of the transformation of a manufacturing operation will illustrate just how the physical changes develop the thinking behind lean accounting. And learning through experimentation, trial and error, and failure is the means to evolve and develop the design and support of managerial accounting for the lean model: that is, the development of people.

Accounting Leadership in Overcoming the Obstacles to Successful Performance Management
Gary Cokins – Global Product Marketing Manager for Performance Management, SAS Institute

Implementing Performance Management (PM) methodologies that enhance business success can prove to be an arduous and challenging task. Proven concepts such as strategy maps, balanced scorecards with KPIs, customer profitability reporting, driver-based budgeting, and activity-based cost management often fall victim to speed-bumps, pitfalls, and other barriers that lurk within an organization. Effective leaders, especially leaders in management accounting, are able to identify and overcome these barriers and, in the process, lead their organizations into a more successful future.

Leadership through Management Information
Ravi R. Nayar – Vice President, Business Strategy and IT Consulting, Accretive Solutions

Data abounds today in the business world. The challenge is to harness the ever exploding well of data into meaningful management information and organizational knowledge so that leadership in an organization can be facilitated and nourished. Management information is a key component to establishing a vision for your organization, setting strategic directions and moving the organization through the necessary trans-formative stages, all key aspects of exercising leadership in an organization. Information technology continues to advance in its capabilities to provide the relevant knowledge in a “pull” fashion. The session will focus on the technological aspects of generating management information, the challenges faced by organizations in generating and harnessing knowledge, and how to overcome these challenges.

Leadership: The Accountant as Decision Support Executive
Douglas T. Hicks – President, D. T. Hicks & Co.

The primary difference between financial accountants and management accountants isn’t the type of organization that employs them – it’s the focus of their work. Financial accountants are historians who care only about reporting historical results following one-size-fits-none, man-made rules. Management accountants are futurists who don’t just predict the future, they help create that future and drive value in their organization by enhancing their company’s decision making processes; they serve as their company’s decision support executives. To be effective, a management accountant’s vision of the organization must be much more comprehensive and reality-based than the financial accountants’ superficial, rule-compliant view of the company.

 Register at IMA Chapter   Select March 18 on calendar