Future-proof | A Podcast For Tomorrow's Accounting & Finance Pros

To know where you’re going, you have to have an understanding of – and an appreciation for – where you’ve been.    Publisher and activist Marcus Garvey said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” And Michael Crichton, the bestselling author of Jurassic Park and Westworld, said, “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”   Why are our two favorite quotes about history also about trees? Who knows. But these quotes encapsulate what we’re going to be discussing on today’s episode: a glimpse back at a little-known but hugely important event in this nation’s history and the role that little-old Maryland played in that event.   Our guest, Chris Formant, is a businessman by trade – a former top executive of a multi-billion-dollar global business and now the CEO of a technology company – but more to the point for this episode, he’s the author of a riveting new book called Saving Was

We spend a lot of time on this show talking about future trends and technologies — things like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and automation – and, more importantly, what those things mean for the future of our profession.   But there are many other hard trends — a.k.a. future facts, a.k.a. things that we know are going to happen – that will have a huge impact on what we do. The topics aren’t always as sexy, sure, but they’re equally impactful, and if we want to get serious about becoming future-ready, we need to be talking about these things, too.   So, that brings us to the decidedly un-sexy world of regulation this week. It probably doesn’t excite you, but we have to talk about this stuff, as a profession, because it might have more of an impact on what we do going forward than anything that technology can throw our way.   Luckily, our guest, Russ Golden, is one of the best people to talk to about regulation in the accounting and finance world because Russ is the Chairman of the Financial Accounting

Our guest today is Neil Irwin, who is the senior economic correspondent at the New York Times and the best-selling author of The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, about the global financial crisis and its aftermath.   And Irwin recently wrote a new book titled How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers. It’s a fascinating and important book, given the changing and complex world we live in.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.   Resources: Neilirwin.com   How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers   Twitter: twitter.com/neil_irwin LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/neil-irwin/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/neil.irwin Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning Future-Proof is a production of Crate Media

Today, we’re talking about the elephant in the room, or what Tom Hood would call the dead moose in the room. That thing that’s stinking up the joint but that nobody wants to do anything about – or, more to the point, nobody knows what to do about it.   That dead moose is talent.    How do you find it? How do you keep it? How do you set your organization apart from all the others out there so people want to work for you?   It’s a HUGE problem, and here’s why in three short words: One point five.   That’s the unemployment rate for accountants and auditors. One point five percent. The national average is 3.7 percent. That means it’s more than twice as hard for employers to find great employees than everyone else.   Welcome to reality, and reality continues to get more and more harsh. Ten thousand Baby Boomers reach retirement age every single day. That means one of two things: they’re retiring and they’re taking all of their wisdom and experience with them or they’re continuing to work, which means younger profe

Today’s show is all about innovation – which, let’s face it, it’s not something the accounting and finance profession is known for. We’re all about accounting for what has happened, and history tells us that what will happen is not our problem.   Except, here’s the thing: We’re living in a world where we’ll be flattened by what’s in front of us if we don’t take the time to look for it, if we don’t take the time to turn around and look for what futurist Andrew Zolli would call those “weak signals of disruptive change” on the horizon. If we don’t start training ourselves to look forward to what’s next as much as we look back to what’s happened, we’re doomed. And here’s why: A few years ago, the Sleeter Group released the results of a survey that showed the top reason why clients decided to leave their CPA firms is that their CPAs were providing reactive services instead of proactive advice. In other words, their CPAs were holding them back instead of helping them become future-ready. At the same time, CPA.com

We’re going to talk about your career path today. If you’re new to the profession, and even if you’re not, we’re not going to lie to you – things are going to get weird.    It’s just the nature of work today. Things are changing at an exponential pace these days and that means your career is also going to change exponentially – so you have to be ready with new skills, a flexible career path, and the ability to shift on a dime when the time comes. More than ever, we all have to be more nimble, more flexible, and more willing to learn new skills. Our careers, our futures, and those of our customers and clients depend on it more now than ever.   We can’t do anything about the twists and turns coming our way, but we can prepare ourselves to take those twists and turns without spinning out or flipping the car over. Luckily, today’s guest puts an inspiring twist on the twists and turns of career and life.    Tony Nitti is a partner in RubinBrown’s Tax Services Group, a well-known contributor of tax content to Forbe

The accounting and finance profession as we know it seems to be under assault. New technologies, staggering legislation and regulations, demographic shifts that are reshaping the face of workforces — we’re experiencing change and complexity on a level we’ve never seen before.   Or is that really true?   In a way, when you think about it, none of what we’re experiencing right now is new. All of the thought leaders out there are calling this “the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Know what that means? There have been three other industrial revolutions before it. We’ve gone through massive change before.   The only difference today is that these changes are happening faster than ever before, which means we have to be more agile than ever, ready to shift with the next big transformation.   And that, in part, is Bill Reeb’s message to the accounting and finance world. Bill Reeb is chief executive of the management consulting firm Succession Institute, LLC. But more importantly, he is the incoming chair of the America

Our guests this week have a challenge for all accounting and finance professionals: start thinking in terms of moonshots.   Now, you might be asking yourself, what in the world is a moonshot? It’s a huge, seemingly insurmountable quest that is ultimately inspirational and game-changing in nature. It’s something that, when achieved, changes the boundary between possible and impossible – just like the USA’s attempt to land Apollo 11 on the moon almost exactly 50 years ago.   Sherif Hallaba and Travis Dirks are the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer, respectively, for an organization named XLabs. They describe themselves as a company that builds moonshot companies for the future, powered by artificial intelligence, unconventional computing, and neurotechnology.   And if that sounds a little “out there” for our little podcast... well, it is, but they make a pretty strong argument that adopting a moonshot mindset will have some very tangible benefits for accounting and finance pros.   To learn mo

Our guest this week is Brian Solis, who you’re probably already familiar with if you’re conference nerds like us. He describes himself as a digital analyst, an anthropologist, and a futurist; he has studied the effects of emerging technology on business, marketing, and culture; and he’s written best-selling books like Engage, The End of Business as Usual, and What’s the Future of Business?   His latest book is called LifeScale – and it could really be a gamechanger for the accounting and finance industry, and really any industry that takes it to heart.   We discuss how time seems increasingly important these days – and why, if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, if you’re looking for your next competitive advantage, if you’re trying to figure out where your business is going and how it’s going to get there, then the first question you should be asking yourself is, “How am I spending my time?”   We’re not trying to shame anybody or make anyone feel guilty. This is all about becoming more aw

This week we’re talking about the role of the CFO – a role that is changing, and pretty radically. Thanks to advances in technology and other disruptions, organizations are expecting their CFOs to play an increasingly strategic role; to actually help drive strategy in the organization, rather than just leading their department and crunching numbers.   It’s a fairly recent phenomenon, but it’s happening quite quickly, and getting up to speed on that is just the latest challenge that finance chiefs are facing.   Joining the show to offer some insight on the fluctuating world of corporate finance is Ash Noah, managing director of CGMA Learning, Education and Development, which is the global association that the American Institute of CPAs formed in partnership with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.   Resources: CGMA Competency Framework: https://www.cgma.org/resources/tools/cgma-competency-framework.html LinkedIn: https

Today’s topic is A.I. Artificial intelligence. You might have heard about it? It’s that thing everyone’s been talking about for the last five years or so. Yeah, the hype is out of this world.   But here’s the thing, and there’s really no getting around it: this isn’t something entirely new or groundbreaking. The technology itself is new, but we’ve been through this before. Excel was supposed to kill our profession, remember? Then came the Internet, and Turbotax, and the cloud. And you know what? We’re still here, adding greater value for our clients than ever.   But technology today is also evolving faster than ever, meaning it’s harder to keep up than ever. Automated solutions are eating away at more of our foundational tasks than ever. However, for the time being anyway, they’re still just tools — tools that augment what we do and allow us to do it with greater efficiency, speed, effectiveness, all while adding more value for our clients than ever.   It’s in that light that CPA.com, the technology arm of th

A lot of folks talk about this notion of becoming future-ready as if it’s some sort of magic trick. They paint a picture of a future where we need to learn all kinds of new stuff — new skills, new technologies, new strategies, and new business models — in order to out-maneuver the machines and remain relevant. And to some extent, that’s true. We’ve got some serious work to do from here on in.   But on the other hand, there is a school of thought — a pretty well-supported and powerful school of thought — that says in order to become future-ready, we really need to be doing nothing more than what we all should have been doing right from the start: providing excellence. Excellence, certainly to our clients and customers, but just as importantly, to our employees.   But that raises a couple questions, like where does excellence come from? And how does it start?   To help us answer these questions, we sit down with Tom Peters, who is as deep a thinker in this space as exists in the world today. He co-wrote In Sea

Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how the accounting and finance profession is changing – but we haven’t spent nearly as much time talking about how those who regulate our profession are changing.   So, on today’s episode, we sit down with Terri Polley, (outgoing) president and CEO of the Financial Accounting Foundation. The FAF is an independent, not-for-profit, private-sector organization that is responsible for the oversight of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, or GASB.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.   Resources: Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terripolley/ Read: “Teresa S. Polley to Step Down as President and CEO of Financial Accounting Foundation” Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

We’re headed back to Annapolis for this week’s episode, where Maryland’s General Assembly recently put a bow on its 2019 legislative session. It was another busy one, including some CPA-related legislation that will impact accounting and finance professionals, not just here in Maryland but throughout the country.   Legislative advocacy, according to our members, is the most important thing that the MACPA does for them, and our president and CEO Tom Hood takes that role very seriously. So, today, we talk to Tom about what went down in Annapolis and how it is likely to impact our profession.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.   Resources: Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning Read: “Legislative Report from the Maryland General Assembly, Sine Die” Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

Where are we going to find tomorrow’s leaders?   We’ve been doing these podcasts for almost a year now, and as much talking as we’ve done about the future, the missing ingredient in all of those conversations has been leadership. We just haven’t spent much time talking about future leadership, and with 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day, that’s a critical part of becoming future-ready.   So this week, we are talking to Emmanuel Gobillot and Katherine Harris, co-authors of Unleash Your Leader: How to Win in Business. It's a blueprint of sorts for how you can turn yourself into a great leader, teaching us what we should be doing today to improve our odds of becoming the leaders of tomorrow.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.   Resources:   Unleash Your Leader: How to Win in Business by Emmanuel Gobillot and Katherine Thomas   CollaborationPartners.co.uk EmmanuelGobillot.com Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning The Connected Leader by Emmanuel Gobillot Leade

If you ask most people — not all, but MOST people — outside of the profession what an accountant does, they’ll probably say “taxes,” or “auditing,” or some variation on the tasks of people who work in public accounting.   But they’re missing about half of the profession, of course. You’ve got educators, you’ve got accountants who work for nonprofits and governments, and you have those who work in business and industry, which is arguably the largest segment of the profession – and that’s why, today, we’re diving deep into the world of management accounting.   Joining us this week is Jeff Thomson, president and CEO of the Institute of Management Accountants, and they’re doing gangbusters over there at IMA. At a time when many associations are struggling to attract new members, the IMA has become one of the fastest-growing accounting associations in the world. Last year, it crossed the 100,000-member mark for the first time in its history.   The issues that impact management accountants and others on the busines

We’ve talked quite a bit in past shows about this notion of “anticipation,” and we’ve talked about this concept as if it’s a skill or competency that you can learn – and it is, but we haven’t spent a lot of time talking about how how you do that.   So, how can you become more anticipatory? How can you train yourself to look for future trends and spot the opportunities those trends provide, and then take advantage of those opportunities before your competition does?   Joining the show again to help us do all of that is Tom Hood, president and CEO of the Maryland Association of CPAs. Tom has mastered the art of anticipation by working side-by-side with the person who wrote the book on the subject, quite literally: Daniel Burrus, a world renowned futurist, author of The Anticipatory Organization and Flash Foresight, and creator of a learning system called The Anticipatory Organization that teaches people how to master this crucial skill.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.

Today we’re discussing why accounting and finance professionals have a lot to gain from adopting an entrepreneurial mindset.   Entrepreneurship isn’t something that many accounting and finance pros have a lot of experience with, but we’re in an era when at least thinking like an entrepreneur can go a long way toward becoming more future-ready.   Entrepreneurs just look at the world differently, and adapting an entrepreneur’s mindset might help us evolve a little faster and become just a little more future-ready.   Our guest David Mammano is the founder of the Avanti Entrepreneur Group, headquartered just outside of Rochester, NY, but open to entrepreneurs everywhere. He’s basically trying to build a huge community of entrepreneurs who can learn from one another, share resources and best practices and war stories, and support each other on their entrepreneurial journeys.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.   Resources: Learn more at AvantiEntrepreneurGroup.com Avanti En

We hope you have your thinking caps on, because today we’re going to be talking about education in this episode – and this is probably the right thing to be talking about for the accounting and finance profession!   We talk about skills quite frequently on this show – the skills we’re going to need to remain relevant in a changing and complex world – so it seems appropriate that we spend some time talking about where we’re going to be getting these skills, and who’s gonna be teaching them to us.   So... should accounting education change to reflect our changing reality? And if so, how should it change? And how quickly should it change?   These are the questions that we explore with Kelly Richmond Pope, a Ph.D., a CPA, and an associate professor at the School of Accountancy and Management Information Systems at DePaul University, where her research focuses on organizational misconduct, ethics, fraud, and how organizations can design cultures and compliance systems to confront these challenges. She has some rea

Everyone talks about the importance of collaboration, but what does it really mean? Working together? Teamwork? Sharing ideas? It’s one of those things that’s hard to define, but we know it when we see it. And because of that, it’s something that everyone defines differently.   But here’s the thing – every list of the most crucial future-ready skills for our profession includes collaboration. Every single one. So we have to figure out a definition that everyone can embrace.   And here to help us figure that out is Rebekah Brown, the director of development with the Maryland Association of CPAs and a thought leader with the Business Learning Institute. She is as passionate and optimistic about the future of accounting and finance as anyone I know, and she has seen first-hand how powerful collaboration can be within our ever-evolving profession, particularly among our younger professionals.   To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.   Resources: Start mastering Future-Ready ski