Future-Proof

Cheryl Duvall is the Consulting Practice Area leader for Gensler’s Southeast Region, the renowned global integrated architecture, design, planning and consulting firm with more than 5,000 professionals in 50 offices worldwide. Cheryl talks about the nature of work, what our workspaces will actually look like going forward, whether or not we will need offices in the future, how leadership is changi...

What we do isn’t who we are; we are all something more than our job. So, what’s that thing that really defines us? Our guest John Garrett, for example, is a CPA, yes. AND he’s an author, a standup comedian, an Emmy Award nominee, and a thought-provoker — he’s a lot besides just a CPA, and he’s encouraging all of us to find our “and” too. He recently wrote a book on the topic — “What’s Your And? Un...

As with pretty much every other trend out there, this pandemic has acted as an accelerator for cyber threats. This was a big problem before COVID-19, but it’s an even bigger problem now. And that makes this week’s conversation particularly relevant, and it’ll likely only become more relevant over the coming months. To help us get ahead of this unsetting trend, we had a conversation with Scott Fles...

Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States of America, but the future of America’s tax policy is going to largely depend on the way a few remaining Senate races turn out. There are a lot of questions about how things will turn out, but Ed Karl is going to try to clarify a few things. Ed is vice president of taxation for the American Institute of CPAs, a member of the Maryland Associatio...

Twyla Verhelst is one of the top 50 women in accounting. She is head of the Accountant Channel and leader of the New Accounting Professionals Program at Freshbooks. She’s also a CPA and has deep personal experience in advisory accounting, so she knows how to leverage technology and create high-value client experiences. We’ve discussed the need to create the “Future-Ready CPA,” and Twyla has a diff...

The world of financing touches everything—including sports. Jeff Goering is the CFO of the Baltimore Ravens NFL team. He talks about how life as a CFO for an NFL team differs from your typical job in finance—and the ways in which it doesn’t. He also discusses the impact COVID-19 is having on teams, how corporate finance has changed in recent years, and how the role of the CFO has changed right alo...

Diversity and inclusion is important. If we want to future-proof our careers, our organizations, our profession, it has to include diversity, equality, and inclusion. Anoop Mehta is president of Science Systems and Applications in Lanham, Maryland. It’s a leading provider of scientific research and development, engineering, and information analytics services in the Earth and space science discipli...

Byron Patrick is a chameleon of sorts, changing his specialty with the times and staying ahead of the curve. He’s a good friend of our host, Bill Sheridan, who met him in 2006 as the Director of IT for KatzAbosch in Maryland. He had just created a virtual office for the firm in an online virtual world called Second Life. Virtual space is a great place to teach and learn, and other platforms have c...

Alexander Hagerup is the founder of Vic. AI, a strategic partner of the MACPA and the Business Learning Institute. Alex is a serial tech entrepreneur based in New York with a strong passion for artificial intelligence. Alex joins us to talk about A.I., and how far we’ve come, and where we are now in terms of the automation possibilities that A.I. gives us. And maybe most importantly, why CPAs shou...

Ed Kless is senior director of partner development and strategy at Sage, a senior fellow at the VeraSage Institute, and the co-host of the Soul of Enterprise podcast. Ed believes that so much of the leadership advice available out there, in hundreds of books on every topic imaginable, completely misses the boat on what great leadership is about. And that, to Ed, is “Healing Leadership.” Ed shares...

Financial performance isn’t the only metric of value we should care about, so why is it all that we report on?  We’re living in a different time. We’re working for different organizations that are impacted by different issues, and we need financial reports and tell different stories and communicate different values than those of the past. Integrative reports intend to fix this problem by incl...

There are some important changes coming to the internet in the form of top-level domains. These are the parts of a website that come after the dot in a domain name. There are seven original top-level domains, which were created in the early days of the Internet — .com, .org, .net, .int, .edu, .gov, and .mil. Today, the number of top-level domains available has exploded, and now, .cpa has finally a...

With the upcoming elections fast approaching, we are going to make a level-headed comparison of the two candidates through the lens of their tax policies. How does each candidate differ when it comes to their ideas about individual and corporate taxes? Joining us to discuss the topic is Tony Nitti. Tony is a tax partner with RubinBrown in Aspen, Colorado. He also teaches the graduate tax programs...

Ron Baker has been a vocal evangelist in favor of the concept of value pricing—the idea of charging based on the value you provide, rather than on the amount of time you spend providing it. He has spent more than 20 years trying to convince people in the accounting profession to throw away the timesheet, but now he’s come to the conclusion that there’s something else that may work instead—somethin...

The skills involved in mastering improv are the same critical skills for becoming a great leader. Peter Margaritis is a CPA, a thought leader with the Business Learning Institute, and a comedian doing stand up in his free time. He knows all about improv, and more importantly, how it connects to CPAs and finance professionals. Good leadership requires connecting with and listening to others, being...

With so many people working from home, companies are being forced to re-examine how they measure productivity and input. Is time spent in front of the computer really the greatest factor for measuring employee contribution? Jody Thompson co-created the Results-Only Work Environment system, or ROWE, in 2003. Since then, it’s gained global traction and has influenced the cultures of countless organi...

11 years ago, when Sebastian Terry was 24 years old, he lost a friend. The sudden death shook Sebastian to his core, to the point where he re-evaluated his own life and asked himself, “Am I happy?”  His answer was, “No.” Sebastian started looking for more happiness in his life. He wrote down a list of 100 things that he thought might make him happy — 100 things that he wanted to accomplish an...

With everything that’s going on in the world today, it could do us all some good to spend more time on positivity. Gretchen Pisano is co-founder and CEO of pLink Leadership, a group that combines strategy, leadership development, and coaching with a focus on the “link” between the practice of positive psychology and better business results. She’s a professional certified coach, she has a master’s...

Tracey Golden is the new chair of the American Institute of CPAs and the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. She’s also a CGMA and an audit partner with Deloitte. In her acceptance speech, after her election, she used the COVID-19 crisis as a backdrop for her thoughts on the role CPAs play as trusted advisors who will help lead us on a financial path forward and throug...

Robbie Kellman Baxter has written the book—quite literally—on the Membership Economy and subscription-based business models. This is the way the world is going. In fact, it’s already gone. And it’s only a matter of time before it makes its way into the CPA profession and starts impacting accounting and finance. In some ways, it already is. Robbie recently released a book called “The Forever Transa...

The work of associations is right in the name: It’s about connections, it’s about relationships, and it’s about networks. These are the things that associations are designed to provide, and this is the time — a time of true crisis — in which those things are more important than ever. To explore all that an association can do, we sit down with Tom Hood, President and CEO of the Maryland Association...

Mark Koziel has been one of the most prominent voices at the American Institute of CPAs for nearly 15 years. He is executive vice president of firm services for the AICPA and a fixture on Accounting Today’s annual list of the most influential people in the profession. He’s been at the forefront of the profession’s response to the COVID-19 crisis—advocating on behalf of CPAs everywhere when it come...

Inclusion remains a huge problem in our profession. As of 2016, just one percent of CPAs employed by public accounting firms were Black. And 0.3 percent of partners at those firms were black. Meanwhile, roughly 13 percent of our country’s population is Black. And the numbers for other people of color weren’t much better. We want our profession to look like the public it serves, but it isn’t close...

What should we be doing with our money, with our investments, when things are as unpredictable as they’ve been lately? There’s a lot of advice out there — some of it good, some of it bad — and we wanted to speak to someone who knows what he’s talking about to sort it out. Lyle Benson is president of L.K. Benson & Company in Baltimore and a MACPA member who has been at the forefront of advancin...

Daniel Burrus is all about one word: Anticipation. How can we anticipate future trends, how can we spot them early, and learn to take advantage of the opportunities those trends provide us? He has written about this skill in his bestselling book “The Anticipatory Organization.” He has built a learning system that’s designed to help us learn how to become more anticipatory.  In spite of all of...