Drivers of Successful Controllership

Preface

For us, it is surprising that this is the first book entitled “Drivers of Successful Controllership.” Such a book should have been published much earlier. In 1987, H. Thomas Johnson and Robert Kaplan triggered a “relevance lost” debate regarding controllership, to which the response came mostly in the form of searching for new fields of activity for controllers (e.g., strategy). But the core question of whether controllership was successful, and what drives such a success, was left mostly unaddressed at the time. However, during the past few years, a collection of new academic studies emerged that addressed this open question. The results reinforced what could already have been observed in many companies: controllers as “business partners” ...