Accounting teams see problems every day. As my returning guest Nick Katko puts it, they fix them, but they don’t necessarily solve them.
Nick is president and owner of BMA, a CPA, and the author of The Lean CFO and co-author of Practicing Lean Accounting. His new book, independently published, is Creating a Continuous Improvement System in Accounting. It grew out of coaching two accounting teams in Ohio, and it comes with a companion webpage of checklists, assessments, and short training presentations.
We talk about why so many accounting leaders misunderstand continuous improvement, often because it was done to them by someone else in the company. Nick lays out the three parts of the system he teaches: simple PDCA problem solving, daily lean management, and improvement events, in that order. He shares an accounts payable example where a team cut invoice defects from about 43% to 15% after a month of gathering data instead of guessing.
We also get into culture and psychological safety. Nick tells the story of a month-end close engagement where the one person who clearly explained the systemic problems was fired between his visits, and why he walked away rather than run it the top-down way leadership wanted. We discuss why psychological safety shifts when a leader walks in or out of the room, why leaders can’t accurately self-assess it, and how a daily problem-solving huddle ended finger-pointing between accounting and purchasing.
Full show notes and links: http://leanblog.org/549
Nick’s book: https://link.amazon/B0dcAyu1m
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