The management accounting malaise written about in the 1980s was, in part, the result of a perceived schism between economic representations of organizational activities and the operational nature of resource flows. Commentators wrote about accounting lags, distorted costs, and obsolescent management accounting controls in a world where financial professionals had failed to invest in an understanding of organizational realities (Kaplan 1983; Johnson and Kaplan 1987). For this reason, the transparency between resource usage and accounting numbers was lacking, and confidence could not be had in accounting information, which was more reflective of anachronistic accounting calculations than of actual resource flows.