I am feverish. My throat is scratchy. I have the sniffles. I want to go to bed, but am at the office. I am taking a 3:30 - 5:00 rest break during an international conference on accounting issues, "3rd Audit and Accounting Convergence 2008 Annual Conference," which is sponsored by our Faculty at UBB, and organized by my partner in teaching management accounting next term, Prof. Dr. MUTIU Alexandra. So I want to attend. At 5:00 I will go to Room 218 to hear the paper of Mr. Aurel Brudan, a young Romanian now doing a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne in Australia. His paper is titled: "From Management Accounting to Strategy Execution and Systems Thinking: the Balanced Scorecard revolution and new research agenda." Believe it or not, that subject parallels my main research direction of some twenty years back, so I gave him some of my old articles, and now want to hear where he is on corporate performance measurments. Alexandra came up with some cold medicine for me when I begged off of attending tonight's dinner with the conference. I guess with that and this break, I'll survive until 7:00.
Class met at 8:10 this morning. We talked about quality management. It was an intriguing class. I asked the students to define quality (a la Pirsig), then asked them to give me "some words that mean quality to you." The words I got from them were RELIABILITY, LONG-LASTING, SAFE, and ENDURANCE. I asked for more, and got no responses. So I said, what about high-performing, stylish, high-tech, etc? I was a bit taken aback by their answers. Those words all apply to a horse-drawn hay wagon! (I am not sure the students were pleased when I pointed that out.)
Tomorrow is Day 2 of this conference, featuring a CPA Research Development Workshop. I hope I feel better in the morning.
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