Future-Proof

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://www.linkedin.com/in/ash-noah-6b11895/
• Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

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 the American Institute of CPAs, released a new whitepaper titled “The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Inflection Point for the Accounting Profession.” And it’s in that light that we sit down with our guest, Kacee Johnson, a strategic advisor with CPA.com.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.

Resources:

• Read: “The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Inflection Point for the Accounting Profession”
• Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacee-johnson/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kaceebop

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

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 Search of Excellence and The Little Big Things, which Warren Bennis called the single-best management book he’s ever read, and his latest book is called The Excellence Dividend.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.

Resources:

• Check out TomPeters.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tom_peters
• Read Tom’s Essay: “The Speed Trap: When Taking Your Time (Really) Matters”
• Book: The Excellence Dividend
• Book: The Professional Service Firm50 (Reinventing Work)
• Book: In Search of Excellence
• Book: The Little Big Things
• Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

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
• Leadershift by Emmanuel Gobillot
• Follow the Leader by Emmanuel Gobillot

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

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 business and industry side are different, in many ways, from those that impact public accounting, but there are many similarities as well. We discuss the similarities and differences, and more importantly, the challenges that management accountants are facing these days – as well as the pretty significant opportunities that those challenges provide at the same time.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.

Resources:

• imanet.org
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ima_jeffthomson
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffthomsonima/
• Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

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.

Resources:

• The Anticipatory Organization: Accounting and Finance Edition
• BLIonline.org/AO
• MACPA.org/future-learning
• Read: The Algorithmic Leader: How to Be Smart When Machines Are Smarter Than You by Mike Walsh
• Read: The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage by Daniel Burrus

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

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 Entrepreneur Podcast: http://avantientrepreneurgroup.com/podcasts-home
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DavidMammanoFan/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidMammano
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidcmammano/
• Entrepreneurial Operating System: StrategyX.BLIonline.org
• Start mastering future-ready skills now at MACPA.org/future-learning

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters

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 really interesting ideas about how accounting education needs evolve to better prepare students for the evolving profession they’re about to enter.

To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog.

Resources:

• Learn more at https://www.kellyrichmondpope.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-richmond-pope-cpa-83689a5/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kellyrpope
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellyrpope/
• Start mastering Future-Ready skills now at MACPA.org/future-learning

Future-Proof is produced by Podcast Masters