Taking management accounting beyond financials

CIMA Management Accountants’ Conference on 24 September

 

The CIMA Management Accountants’ Conference provides a forum for acclaimed academic thought leaders such as Professor Danture Wickramasinghe and skilled corporate practitioners like Deepanie Perera to share advances in the field and initiate discussion about future developments.

Since its inception, management accounting has been concerned with how to get things done with and through people within business organisations. In a liberal world, people are considered no longer only considered productive forces for economic purposes. As management does not operate in a vacuum, this neoliberal world view has implications for management accounting practices.
Top-down budgeting or autocratic control traditions – which considered people only as forces in labour processes – can no longer be relied upon. Instead, the need is for alternative management accounting techniques which value and promote the human face.
Speaking on ‘Unlocking and Unleashing Value in the Human Dimension,’ Professor Wickramasinghe reveals that to maximise total prosperity through a human approach to management accounting, people must be considered not only as a factor of production, but as social citizens. He will also discuss the performance indicators that management accounting must develop to encourage managers to operate with a humane focus.  Professor Wickramasinghe is the first Sri Lankan to earn a PhD in Management Accounting and to be a Professor of Management Accounting in a British University, a well known management accounting researcher, as well as an enthusiastic and talented presenter with 30 years of experience.
He is now Professor of Management Accounting at the University of Glasgow, and was formerly Professor of Management Accounting and the Director of Centre for Accounting and Accountability Research at the University of Hull; he has also held many senior positions in highly respected academic institutions in Sri Lanka and internationally.
He has presented at over 30 international conferences, seminars and workshops; authored for Management Accounting Change: Approaches and Perspectives and The Handbook of Accounting and Development; published over 30 articles in international journals which include Accounting, Accountability and Auditing Journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Journal of Accounting & Orga-nizational Change, Qualitative Research in Accounting & Manag-ement.
Another key non-financial performance goal and an enduring and pressing need for both the public and private sectors in times like today, is the ability to remain ethical in all dealings, whilst still delivering value to stakeholders.
Perera will discuss how going beyond mere profit, an ethically run, transparent business that is adopting good governance can gain immeasurable reward. Such reward may range from immediate to long term returns; being chosen over competition and less transparent suppliers. The well-informed modern customer watches how businesses make decisions, and how transparent they turn out to be.
Business today realises that absence of these virtues has a credible risk of affecting not only one business, but perhaps the entire social canvass. A number of socio-cultural dimensions determine ethical behaviour and transparent management, and these will be addressed in her presentation, ‘Grasping the Power of Transparency’.
Perera is the Founder Director and Chief Executive Officer of Target Resource (Pvt) Limited, a business consulting, training, head-hunting and recruitment and research firm founded in 2009, and serving top corporate and public sector enterprises, both locally and globally. She is a Business Consultant, HR Specialist, Trainer, Lecturer, Writer and an International Researcher. Her successful corporate and academic career involves diverse industries both in manufacturing and service; having held positions in the likes of board director, executive vice president, consultant and course director.
Having addressed a large number of business executives at national and international conferences, she has experience training a number of personnel across diverse fields and cultures. She holds an MBA from the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM), University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka and a Diploma in HRM from the UK and is a regular contributor of academic and current affairs articles to local and international publications. Also addressing conference are Emma Cunis, Executive Director – CIMA; Alois Hofbauer, Managing Director – Nestle Lanka PLC; Aubrey Joachim, Principal Consultant – Leading edge change; Ravi Edirisinghe, Vice President – Freight Links International (Pvt) Ltd; and D Swaminathan, CEO/Managing Director – Infosys BPO, India.
‘Reboot Your Business Beyond Financials’ will be held on 24 September at Hotel Galadari. The silver sponsor for this event is Wisdom Business Academy. ETV is the electronic media partner and LBR and LBO are digital media partners. The print media partner is Wijeya Newspapers Ltd.
For more information, please contact Jennifer Gnaniah on 2503880 ext 263.