While it is an incredible honor to be accepting the Lifetime Contribution to Management Accounting Award, it is also a little baffling. How did this happen? Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's (1843) words seem very appropriate: “life can only be understood backwards; but then one forgets that it must be lived forwards.” I am very happy for the opportunity to take a look backward to try to make some sense of what I have been doing for the past 40 years.
Let me begin with some personal history about those who have mentored me, and some lessons learned. After that, I will discuss the time I have spent going inside organizations, and how two topics on which I have worked—management accounting and manufacturing, and narcissism and personnel control—have benefitted from this fieldwork.
In 1967, my father, the late Sydney Young, a geneticist at the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), was...
