The wide range of possible performance criteria for business enterprises raises serious questions of definition and measurement. Indeed, measurement is at the heart of the analysis of success and failure of business operations, and much depends on the quality of the information that is available. The evaluation of business performance comes into sharp focus with the pUblication of companies' annual and semi-annual accounts, which are then followed by commentaries from stockbrokers and business analysts in reports to investors and in articles in the financial press. Captains of industry may...

The task of management has become increasingly complex in recent years. Chief executives and senior managers are confronted with the daunting challenge of making sense of a myriad of variables that affect the performance of business systems and of determining causal relationships that underlie seemingly unstructured problems. A wide gulf now exists between theory and practice in the field of management. Pronouncements by theorists have become increasingly unintelligible to practitioners, while practical propositions by management consultants - often presented as recipes derived from...