How to Innovate Like Google

Last year at the DigitalCPA Conference I got a chance to tour Google’s Headquarters in Silicon Valley. I was with a group of leading partners in major firms including my great friend, Joey Havens. We were treated to a discussion with Google’s Chief Accounting Officer and other members of their team as well as the latest from Google Cloud and their office products. Of course the discussion inc used blockchain and artificial intelligence and all of the technology you would expect from a company like Google, but even more impressive was how their innovative DNA was evident in every function of the company. Even the finance and accounting team members at Google are required to be innovative. In fact, every member of the Google team is expected to be innovative and to be constantly thinking about how to transform everything and anything to support the mission.

Now think about the accounting profession. When is the last time we innovated? Double-entry accounting circa 1494? Dan Hood at Accounting Today said, Accounting is “one of the few professions where having the word “creative” attached to your products is a bad thing, where SALY is a sought-after situation. The profession’s principal products — the audit, the financial statement and the tax return — remain much the same as when they were first introduced, and what changes have been seen in them were mostly driven by regulators and legislators outside the profession.”

Given the pace of change we are seeing today and the exponential technology #hardtrends facing our Profession, isn’t it time we adopt a new mindset around innovation and accounting?