EDITOR'S NOTE

Robert N. Anthony, the Walker professor of management controls emeritus at Harvard Business School (HBS), died last week in Hanover, N.H. at the age of 90. He was best known for “Essentials of Accounting,” a ground-breaking self-paced primer that was first published in 1964 and is still widely used today.

“He took the arcane field of accounting and made it useful,” said Regina E. Herzlinger, the McPherson professor of business administration at HBS. “He did this not only for business, he did it for the government and non-profits.”

Anthony authored many books during his career, including “Accounting: Text and Cases” and “Management Control Systems.” But it was “Essentials of Accounting” that was “revolutionary” and his “greatest contribution,” according to David W. Young, an emeritus professor at Boston University and Anthony’s co-author on a number of texts.

“It was a Tower of Babel in management control before [Essentials]. People used the same terms to mean different things,” he said. “[Anthony] organized everything and created a conceptual framework for all the research being done in systems analysis.”

Anthony enjoyed a long career at Harvard—50 years by Young’s estimate.

Though he spent most of his professorship at HBS, Anthony spent several years at the College, beginning in 1975 revamping an economics course, said Young, who was a teaching fellow for the class. The course was relatively easy until Anthony “completely turned it around,” Young said.

“We just made it a serious course in which people were expected to learn things,” said Young. “This led to some very surprised and very unhappy students.”

During the Vietnam War, Anthony served as comptroller of the Defense Department under Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. According to Young, Anthony used accounting systems to evaluate the effectiveness of military programs. Though the department did not want him to succeed—“Nobody likes transparency applied to themselves,” said Young—Anthony’s “power personality” got the job done.

EDITOR'S NOTE

A Dec. 7 obituary of Robert N. Anthony, an emeritus professor at the Business School, contained several statements that were incorrectly attributed to David W. Young, the Boston University emeritus professor who co-wrote “Management Control in Nonprofit Organizations” with Anthony.

Young said that Anthony’s 1965 text “Planning and Control Systems: A Framework for Analysis” was “revolutionary” and perhaps his “greatest contribution.” Young did not use that description for Anthony’s 1964 primer on bookkeeping, “Essentials of Accounting.”

Moreover, the information and quotes in the final paragraph of the article, wrongly attributed to Young, in fact came from McPherson Professor of Business Administration Regina E. Herzlinger. Young never suggested that then-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara did not want Anthony to succeed in his effort to develop a new accounting and control system for the military.

The Crimson regrets the errors.