Future-Proof

This episode releases on the cusp of a new year — so, if you’re reading this in 2019, we want to wish you a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2020. Here’s to you and yours. Of course, with the new year comes New Year’s resolutions, and there’s one resolution that all accounting and finance professionals (and, really, most people) can benefit from: becoming a better delegator. So we sit down...

Client Accounting Services (CAS) are the services that CPAs provide because clients can’t do them, don’t want to do them, or just aren’t good at doing them. It’s that full-menu offering of taking over many of a client’s routine internal accounting chores.  The popularity of these services is growing, too — to the extent that a lot of people in the accounting and finance profession consider CA...

Today’s episode puts the P in CPA — because we’re talking about public practice! What is going on with CPA firms these days, anyway? Quite a bit, as it turns out. The world is changing, and with every change that the world experiences these days, the folks who work at CPA firms seem to get a double dose of it. They have to figure out how to embrace these changes and disruptions inside their own fi...

Today we’re asking an important question that every industry is going to have to ask sooner or later: What does future-focused leadership look like? Our guest, Rachel Druckenmiller, is on a mission to humanize the workplace by igniting intentional leadership. She has made a name for herself nationally in the fields of workplace wellness and culture. In 2019, she was recognized as a 40 Under 40 Gam...

So you know Simon Sinek? Best-selling author, leadership expert, the people-don’t-buy-what-you-do-they-buy-why-you-do-it guy? Well, he has a new book titled The Infinite Game and our host, Bill Sheridan, has become a bit obsessed with this notion of playing the Infinite Game, of adopting an infinite mindset. So we sat down with Stephen Shedletzky, chief of staff with Simon Sinek’s team at Start Wi...

Back in episode 66 , we spoke with Matt Loeb about digital transformation, and he brought up a great point — just because you’re enacting some digital solutions doesn’t make you a digital organization. There’s a difference between doing digital and being digital, which is about culture and mindset more than anything else. Jeanne Ross is a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Research...

Today’s episode focuses on something a little different. Not the technology that’s going to prepare us for the future, not the hard trends that will affect change in the future, and not why we should stop panicking about AI putting all auditors out of work. Today, we’re talking about joy. Because our guest is Richard Sheridan, co-founder and CEO of Menlo Innovations (and of no relation to our host...

Riddle me this, Batman: What do you get when you cross exponential advances in technology with an unrelenting regulatory environment? The answer is no joke: what you get, oftentimes, is one big headache. These “hard trends” or “future facts” that futurist Daniel Burrus talks about — the things that we know will happen, with absolute certainty — they’re hard enough to come to grips with individuall...

Halloween is over. Autumn is kicking into full gear. And you know what that means — it’s time to talk about audits! Because the future of audit is... uncertain, to say the least.  Luckily, we had an opportunity to talk to Mark Miklosovic, the Customer Proposition Strategy Lead for tax professionals at Thomson Reuters, who spends much of his time thinking very critically about the future of th...

Pretty much every survey under the sun identifies recruitment and retention as one of the top five issues facing accounting and finance organizations today. Everyone is struggling with this and nobody seems to know how to solve it. There are a lot of suggestions being put forward throughout the profession — communicate, be a role model, make your expectations clear, offer a safe working environmen...

Today we’re going to talk about something that most accounting and finance professionals probably never give a second thought — writing. Writing is one of those skills that we all take for granted. We all do it in some way, shape, or form every day, so we all assume we’re awesome at it. Maybe even better at it than some of our peers? This is a misconception that happens all the time, in different...

Pascal Finette is co-founder of be radical , an organization that teaches leaders how to create new business models for success, positively embrace disruption, and prepare their people to be future-forward and future-ready. He is also chair for Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation at Singularity University , which is a global learning and innovation community that uses exponential technologies to...

Summer’s over, October’s here, and things are changing. But that’s the state of our world today, isn’t it? And not just when it comes to the weather.  Change is the new normal, and that can be an uncomfortable thing, especially for  CPAs. But for those who are ready to embrace it — to adapt a more nimble and flexible mindset — there are a lot of opportunities just waiting to be taken adv...

We’re jumping back on the culture train today. As you can probably tell, we’re big believers in getting your culture right. We’ve had conversations on the topic with Tom Peters , Karl Alrichs , Jamie Notter , Richard Silberstein , and David Barrett — and that’s because it’s a REALLY important conversation to be having!  Really, there might not be a bigger or more important differentiator in b...

Today’s episode is all about Color Accounting — and if you’re not familiar with Color Accounting yet, you need to be! So, we invited Peter Frampton, co-founder of Color Accounting, onto the show to teach us all about what Color Accounting is and why it’s so important to the future of our profession. To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog . Resources: ColorAccounti...

Today we’re going to talk about something you probably didn’t expect from this show: Cannabis.  But legalization for both medical and recreational cannabis products is growing at the state level. At this point, it seems like a hard trend. So it’s high time we talked about this stuff (pun intended)  if we want to future-proof this profession. To help us come to a joint understanding, if y...

We’ve been talking about the cloud for so long now that it’s easy to assume that everyone already has it figured out – but that’s the wrong assumption to make with our profession.   There are exceptions, of course. There are some accounting and finance pros out there who take pride in getting ahead of new technologies early. But a sizeable part of the profession hasn’t made that leap yet.   So Bla...

How do you transform your organization into a truly digital organization?    It’s not as simple as it sounds. You can’t just about employ some digital technologies and think that you’ve made it. Doing digital and being digital are not the same things. Not even close.   So, we’re joined by Matt Loeb, principal of Optimal Performance Seekers and acting CEO of SECURE, who is simply one of the deepest...

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 anythi...

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’...

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 . I...

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 peopl...

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...

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 t...

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...