An Alternate Universe for Accounting Professionals

Journalists don’t need to do a lot of crystal ball gazing, which is nice – reporting on the past is not nearly as nerve racking as speculating about the future. But every now and then, we have occasion to take a step back, or perhaps a step aside is a better visualization, and peek at what might happen instead of that which has already passed.

And that’s exactly what occurred last month at the AICPA’s annual Executive Roundtable, a technology-centric event held in New York City at the AICPA headquarters (and more often than not an excuse for Mother Nature to dump unheard of nasties from the sky on the collected leaders, pundits, and tech-gurus, all of whom carry some sort of torch for the accounting profession).

Not only were we confronted with the usual array of descriptions and conversations surrounding the way in which accountants do their jobs and could be doing them better, a cornucopia, if you will, of enviable solutions – if only all accountants had all the time available to them to examine, experience, learn, and select the very best collection of tools and treasures with which to do their jobs in the most efficient, effective, and economic way possible – but we were also delighted by the presentation of one Pascal Finette, a self-described enfant terrible (that’s right, get out your French dictionary), who opened new doors of discovery for us all.

Finette is co-founder of a management consultancy called Radical Ventures, an organization specializing in cultural change, disruptive innovation, and exponential thinking, and he is also the chair for entrepreneurship and open innovation at Singularity University, an organization dedicated to providing educational programs designed to help individuals and businesses “understand cutting-edge technologies and how to use these technologies to positively impact billions of people.” No small task.

Finette took us on a mind journey, promising to change the way we look at the world around us in the mere 75 minutes in which he held our attention. And indeed he delivered on that promise. “Where is the Amazon in your business?” he challenged us, as he described his methodology for pinpointing the place of disruption in, well, anything – business, relationships, buying our groceries, putting a roof over our heads – it didn’t matter what topic we chose, the method was the same. Find the disrupter (he gave us tools for this) and remember that in most cases, for every negative there is a positive. Move outward from the disruption to see the ripples, the consequences, the impact of the disruption, looking many layers outward, and remembering to check for both positives and negatives. I was even looking at turkey sandwiches differently by the end of the day.

To step aside just a bit, as I described in my introduction, I was happy to read Randy Johnston’s column this month, in which he describes a similar process developed by Jerome Glenn of MindTools. Johnston applies Glenn’s Futures Wheel to everyday client interactions and comes away with a checklist that can change the way you observe and interact with clients from this day forward. In much the same way that Finette searches for the ripples that emanate from disruption, Johnston explains how you can take the information you gather and actually incorporate that into a workable system that can permeate your client engagements and provide a ripple effect that will alter and improve the way you work.

Get ready to expand your mind.