As Henry Ford pointed out, no one knows what a cost should be. Yet, cost
accounting has held hegemony for far too long over the pricing strategies of
businesses everywhere, embedding the conventional wisdom that costs
determine price. Merely because a practice is widely adopted and utilized
does not make it optimal, not to mention true. At one point, a majority
thought the world was flat. As John Kenneth Galbraith points out, “I have
learned that to be right and useful, one must accept a continuing divergence
between approved belief—what I have elsewhere called conventional wisdom—and the reality.”