Count Me In®

Connect with Leah
Workman Forensics

Full Episode Transcript
Adam:

Welcome to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from a management accountants perspective. My cohost Rouba Zeidan spoke with our special guest Leah Wietholter. Leah is a certified fraud examiner and the author of the new book Data Sleuth: Using Data in Forensic Accounting Engagements and Fraud Investigations. Leah began her career supporting forensic accountants at the FBI and has since branched out to lead her own forensic accounting and private investigation firm. Forensic investigations are the center of so many great crime shows these days, and it was exciting to hear how accountants expose fraud and other problems lurking in bank accounts, credit card statements, and payroll reports. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Rouba:

Good morning, Leah. And thank you so much for joining us.

Leah:

Thank you so much for having me.

Rouba:

I'm really looking forward to learning more about your very kind of interesting arena and industry, which is and you have a wonderful background in the FBI. So maybe you can drop in some examples on that part of it. So can you tell us a little bit about forensic accounting and forensic accounting engagement? What does it entail?

Leah:

Yeah, so I work forensic accounting engagements as a private consultant. So I'm not affiliated with law enforcement or anything like that. I own a forensic accounting practice in Oklahoma, and the majority of our engagements are solving some sort of financial problem that's either in litigation or could end up in litigation. So we work a lot of embezzlement investigations or fraud investigations. Then we also work to help sort through partnership dispute or a shareholder dispute, so if someone believes the general partner or whoever's managing the money, usually, has been taking more than their fair share, we get involved there and kind of our third other largest category of a forensic accounting engagement is in divorce matters when the two parties are looking to get divorced and they need to split their assets. Then usually one party is not familiar with how the marital funds were handled.

Leah:

And so they wanna make sure that when they go to divide those assets, that they're getting their fair share. So we help them either get comfortable with the known assets or try to find any other hidden assets within that situation. And we usually only work divorce cases. If there's a business involved, there's a lot of opportunities when people have closely held businesses where they can hide assets or just, they own things that maybe their spouse doesn't know about. So those are kind of the three types of engagements that fall under the three types of cases that are typically involved in a forensic accounting engagement for us.

Rouba:

Interesting. I mean, that, that kind of implies that there are numerous kind of legal consequences and circumstances you know, that might come into the equation and most well known would be maybe investigating alleged fraudulent activities like you, you know, in your experience, how prepared is the average finance and accounting professional to handle such circumstances?

Leah:

I would say that the accounting and financial professionals that I run into, they're familiar with what fraud looks like. They're familiar with, you know, the concept of, we talk about this a lot, cuz we use data analytics, but a lot in our investigations, but we talk about what should have happened, the framework what should have happened versus what happened. And so finance and accounting professionals know what should have happened. And then they also know what happened, but taking that information and then putting it in a format that could be explained to a judge or a jury or even to the client themselves is where our specialty usually shows up. As opposed to, you know, maybe someone working in corporate or even in audit connecting those dots. One of the things that I've been focusing on lately with my team is, okay, I understand that these journal entries, for example, these journal entries look strange and we can tell the client, Hey, these journal entries look strange, but we need to tell them why that matters.

Leah:

Why should they care about it? And what is the risk to them? What is the financial loss to them? And being able to connect what we know about accounting to losses, to the story of what happened, because that's what helps in, if it does result in litigation, that's what helps communicate the findings. So we've gotta be able to connect what we know as financial professionals with a group of individuals that this is not their specialty. And so connecting those dots, understanding a lot of times finance and accounting professionals are very good at understanding what all the financial statements say and what that means, but then to translate that into, okay, why should my client care, which is usually connected to what actual dollars are missing which would be found on bank statements and credit card statements and payroll reports. So just knowing where to go for that information to best communicate what happened. And the corresponding loss is kind of where this forensic accounting niche comes into play.

Rouba:

Did you find that the need for forensic accounting has grown over the past few years and more specifically, you know, post the COVID era? And if so, how and why?

Leah:

So when I first started in forensic, so my background, I worked for two years with the FBI under the direction of a forensic accountant. And that's how I got into this niche so early in life. But then when I joined I started doing this from the private sector. It wasn't as popular and that would've been like 2009. It, it was becoming more popular. The more that technology has advanced and the access that we have that keeps growing to different kinds of data and understanding what that data can tell us. And you know, how we can use that to understand what's happening and just to understand and put our arms around those facts. Then I think forensic accounting is becoming more popular in the private sector. And I haven't really noticed a huge increase in the need of forensic accounting.

Leah:

I think a lot of people after COVID, I tell my team, I think people are just mad at each other. So we have a whole lot more like the volume of partnership disputes is so much greater than it was before. We're starting to see an uptick in divorces as well. So I don't really know that COVID affected how much forensic accounting or, you know, increased that need. But I have seen an increase in over the course of the last 12 years or 15 years of my career in that, because there's so much more information readily available, that it is possible to find out what happened without relying on law enforcement to get involved and law enforcement, especially in the US, they already have too much work as it is. So if people want answers to their questions and they want it timely, then I think the best resource for them is a forensic accountant in financial investigations.

Leah:

So that's what I have kind of noticed in, you know, this basically has consumed my entire career, this field. And so just noticing the trends that way, you know, and like I said, COVID, I don't know that it increased the need for forensic accounting. It's just that there seem to be even more disputes since COVID. And so then that means that there's a lot more volume for not just forensic accountants, but I like to ...

Connect with Rachel

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to another edition of Count Me In. The podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountants perspective. My guest today is Rachel Baesler, VP of financial reporting and technical accounting at FLEETCOR Technologies, a leading global business payments company. We talk a lot on this show about the need for accountants inside the organizations to partner cross-functionally with leaders and groups, driving business performance and growth as an accounting leader at a company that has completed over 90 acquisitions, Rachel is the perfect guest to help us better understand how accountants can overcome common stereotypes and thrive as strategic business partners. So let's get started.

Adam:

So, Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, and we're just gonna jump right in cuz we're talking about strategic partnerships today and when you're building those strategic partnerships, a common term or role today for accounting and finance professionals is business partnering. That's the term we've been hearing a lot. And so how do you ensure success when building these relationships across departments?

Rachel:

So to ensure business success, collaboration and partnership across departments is critical to the success of the organization, I was reading this Deloitte report that said that 83% of organizations want to increase the time spent on finance business partnering over the next three years. So it can be difficult to foster open communication with accounting. We're often seen as an impediment rather than a strategic business partner. So they understand that we handle the numbers and that we handle compliance, but it's up to us to, you know, articulate our value and demonstrate how we can be a strategic partner. A major component of FLEETCOR's success is our M&A strategy we've had over 90 acquisitions to date. Each of these require extensive involvement from accounting. So last year we purchased AFEX for over 400 million. They are part of our cross-border payment solutions similar to Cambridge global payments, which are all newly aligned under our court pay business unit.

Rachel:

We have noticed over time that we are getting similar accounting issues come up in these deals. So for our deal team, we created this quick reference guide and we shared it with them. So these matters that come up over and over again, they have them at the front of their mind versus the back. This helps, you know, demonstrate our value as a partner cuz they know every decision they're making and an acquisition, there is an accounting impact. It also helps just foster a relationship with them. Now they know, you know, they know my name, they know to come to me, when things come up, I can help them work through issues and they understand their accounting implications.

Adam:

So is that why it's so important for accounting and finance professionals? Because you have to be a seat at the table, no matter what's happening, whether it's an M&A, or the strategy that's being run or FP&A like all those different things are happening. Why is it so important for accounting and finance professionals to be a part of that?

Rachel:

Well, there's, you know, the compliance matters, obviously it's our job to ensure that the books and records are accurate, but also, you know, in the business environment today, all departments are being asked to demonstrate their value and partnering with other departments is how we demonstrate our value in an organization. And this also helps us, you know, foster culture of governance and compliance because you know, we have a seat at the table and we know what's going on in the business. It also helps us, you know, understand what's going on in the business. So we can better communicate with our stakeholders. You know, I'm the one preparing a lot of investor documents, right? So knowing what's going on across the organization helps me communicate more effectively with our investors.

Adam:

So what skills have you had to develop to be a successful relationship builder in this process?

Rachel:

Okay. So I read another Deloitte study and it was talking about the main competencies you need to be a successful finance business partner. And it talked about you know, being able to challenge negotiate, have, you know, commercial acumen, strategic thinking. And then one, I think for me has been critical, which is relationship management, such a simple thing, but building interpersonal relationships with people in other departments helps foster open communication and builds trust. You know, we live in an environment where we receive lots of emails. Whenever possible, I try to meet with people in person or have a face to face video call even pick up the phone, you know, you're not, you don't really have the opportunity to build a relationship when you're communicating over email, this, you know, just helps facilitate an open dialogue and create a trusted relationship. I'll give you an example.

Rachel:

I was working on this project with, you know, it was KPIs and I was having to talk to different leaders of the businesses. I'm sure it felt like an incremental ask. One of our lines of business leaders I was working with on this project. We just started chit chatting about Disney world. He has kids, I have kids, he was giving me some tips. I haven't taken my children yet. They're a little too young, but we built this, you know, great rapport fast forward a few months. And we acquired a business and he didn't understand, you know, how the revenue recognition pattern was working with one of the new products. Fast forward a few months later, we acquired a new business and we have a new product and there's trouble with the business leaders, understanding how the revenue recognition pattern works for that new product. You know, now they know my name, they know my face. They know to reach out to me, I can help them, you know, translate the, you know, the product to the accounting impact. So it helps me, you know, I'm getting to know the business that we've acquired from the business leaders and from the target itself. And you know, I'm at the front end of the issue they know to get me involved and it's just a really productive relationship and it, you know, helped us get involved early. So.

Adam:

Yeah, it's almost like you've you learned how to connect on a human side with your other collaborators and then because you connected, you developed the relationship and that allowed you to, when that you needed their help or they needed your help, you were able to connect in a better way.

Rachel:

Absolutely. I mean, you know, if I'm just shooting an email, so I'd be like, give me this, you know, or even asking politely. You know, I'm not gonna be the front of their mind when a problem comes up. So, you know, just spending a little bit extra time with folks, you know, building that connection, it really helps create a good relationship. And you know, it enables you to have a strategic partnership. I think that's really hard to just like force that on someone.

Adam:

Yeah. I was thinking, you know how it's always easy for us to talk about for as accountants to say, how do we partner with everybody else? What advice would you give to somebody who is not an accountant? How do you best partner with the accounting team? We've already talked about the human side and building that relationship, but are there other elements that we can say, Hey, this would, this would be best way to communicate. This is the best way to kind of ...

Connect with Amanda:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-cohen-0b4b81a6/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/resolver-inc/ 

https://twitter.com/Resolver 

https://www.facebook.com/ResolverInc 

https://www.instagram.com/resolverinc/ 

https://www.youtube.com/user/ResolverGRC

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

I'm Adam Larson and welcome to Count Me In, the podcast focused on all the ways management accountants can help businesses thrive through smart financial management and data driven decision making. My guest today is Amanda Cohen, the vice president of product at Resolver, a software company helping businesses manage complex interconnected risks. We talk about the image problem that governance, risk, and compliance functions or GRC have at many businesses; namely, that they're tedious, repetitive and restrictive. Amanda explains how this negative perception of GRC actually hampers innovation and growth. The good news is Amanda has tips to transform this frog into a prince at your company, making GRC a more dynamic and valued partner to business operations and performance. I hope you enjoy this modern day fairytale featuring our favorite stars: management accountants.

Adam:

Amanda, thank you so much for coming on our podcast today. We're really excited to have you on and today we're gonna be focusing a lot on risk or governance, risk and, compliance, kind of the big three words governing organization. And one of the biggest things that we kind of wanted to focus on is, you know, there's an image problem that you've said a number of times that there's an image problem with with GRC. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that as we get started today?

Amanda:

Yeah, certainly. So I think a lot of it, well, I think there's a couple different angles that the governance risk and compliance space has a bit of an image problem. First and foremost, I don't think a lot of the organization understands exactly what they do and how they provide value to the organization. And so often they're seen as a barrier that maybe comes in a little late during the project or, or something that's preventing you from getting to your objectives. And really, I think that's all just in terms of the order of operations. If we can flip that around a little bit and bring these teams in earlier, it's not that person who's getting in your way of completing your project or helping you complete or achieve your objective. Really what you're starting to do is you are bringing them along for the ride and helping or using those teams to help guide your project and make sure that it's operating with the realm of what's appropriate for the organization.

Amanda:

And then they're gonna help you find really creative, suggestive alternatives to help move things. So that's kind of one area of the image problem is, you know, there's a barrier specifically that they seem to be imposing. And then the other one that we hear a lot from our customers is really that it seems like these teams are constantly asking me for the same information. And so, you know, you might get a request from someone in audit and they're looking for a bunch of documentation on how you run a particular process. And then two weeks later, two months later, someone from compliance is coming in and they're you the exact same question, you know, your internal controls team, same thing. And so it's like, why can these teams not just get together come up with some kind of strategy on how to collect that information and then reduce the onus on me because the business is really just trying to accomplish their job. It's not their job to provide you with the documentation. And so when there's more synergy between those teams it also reduces a little bit of that friction that you often get from the business.

Adam:

It almost seems like when you're looking at risk management from an organizational perspective, the organization's mission kind of needs to be the foundation of that. And the focus of that risk management, because otherwise everybody won't be on the same page if it's not there, how do you get there?

Amanda:

So, I mean, there's a couple ways to help be a part of those strategic decisions, be a part of what the organization is trying to accomplish. It really helps when you have buy in from the top. If your executive endorses and believes that risk and compliance has a place at the table during those discussions, it's gonna be a lot easier, but in order to, it's a bit of a chicken and egg, because it's also in order to be included in those conversations, you need to be providing insights. And so something that, you know, if all the risk function or the compliance function, whatever it may be is there. And they're just, you know, showing up at that board meeting, showing up at that executive meeting to present their five minutes on their findings and, you know, maybe their last regulatory audit, like, okay. But what have you uncovered what's in your data to help us understand, you know, how the organization is gonna achieve their objectives? Are there potentially a couple alternatives that we could consider or that we should be thinking about as we're making these strategic decisions? And so when risk can bring more valuable data that also helps propel them forward and allows them to be a part of that conversation and that'll help get that executive endorsement and then allow them to be, you know, help the organization achieve that mission that they're trying to accomplish.

Adam:

So I know that you know, it's probably rare that, you know, your CMA, your certified management accountant, your management accounting will lie awake at night thinking, oh no. What about that regulatory compliance document? It is something that's important. And a lot of times culture pl...

Resources:
1.  Quora link to building a great Linkedin Profile

2. Articles about job search/networking or how to reach out to that mutual connection like we discussed in the middle of the episode
3. Daniel's book: https://www.amazon.com/Build-LinkedIn-Profile-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B00N18B2RS

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountant's perspective. I'm Neha Lagoo Ratnakar from IMA. And today I'm speaking with Daniel Alfon. Daniel is the author of the book, How to Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success. He helps businesses and individuals succeed by maximizing their reach on one of the world's largest business networking communities. Today he'll be sharing pro tips for using LinkedIn for career networking, business development, content marketing, and more. If you use LinkedIn for any reason, this is a conversation you don't wanna miss. Let's get started.

Neha:

So hi Daniel. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Daniel:

Thank you very much, Neha, I'm glad to be part of Count Me In.

Neha:

Excellent. So let's start with the why. Social media is not something that is top of mind for many professionals, especially accounting and finance professionals. So help us understand: why is social media and more specifically LinkedIn so valuable for our accounting and finance listeners?

Daniel:

Oh, that's a great question. I think the easy answer is that whenever an employer or any client will Google your name, then your LinkedIn profile is going to top the list on Google. That's the simple reason. And if you care about the image and your professional image, then you should leverage LinkedIn and make it shine.

Neha:

All right. And as a tag along question to that, how can accounting and finance professionals leverage LinkedIn better?

Daniel:

Great. It starts with understanding our career objective, whether some of the listeners here could be managers who want to get promoted in the organization or moms who had their maternity leave and want to get back to the workforce or young people trying to start out in business or get the the CMA certification then having target list of companies or career objectives for you is the prerequisite for anything you'd like to to do. And then because your LinkedIn profile, the most frequent action LinkedIn users perform on the platform is visiting other people's profiles.

Neha:

Mm-hmm, that's true.

Daniel:

And it needs to speak for itself. In other words, if I go to your profile, you will not be there to add information. And, when I see the book that you've released and I see your headline, and I see the photo and the VO photo is visible, and I see that you've added feature content. I'm likelier to stay here and try to discover what is it you do? And for the accountant or the management accountant would be seeing what they have achieved in their current position. And why is it a good idea for me to reach out to them?

Neha:

Wow. I love that. Keeping the person who's visiting your profile engaged throughout. Awesome. And thank you for bringing up career objectives. And we are in the era of the great resignation right now. So let's pivot to that part of LinkedIn job search. And if, if somebody's looking for a better job, how can LinkedIn be helpful for you?

Daniel:

Okay. The keyword is networking. When we think about the four step that that you that you roll about, and network is probably the single most important element we need to take into account. We may move from one part of the world to another. Our network is the key asset that is likely to make our career grow. And whenever we run an advanced search on LinkedIn, LinkedIn advanced searches or excellence, and that's probably one of the misused and underutilized assets, you can run advanced searches for a company you're interested in, and you would be able in many cases to identify the person you are likely to report to. And in some cases, you'll see that you and them, you share mutual connections,

Neha:

Right.

Daniel:

You connect with people, you know, well, you could leverage that meaningful connection, leave LinkedIn, and ask that person to introduce you to your ideal hiring manager or to your ideal customer and the power is to leave LinkedIn. As much as the LinkedIn is a powerful platform, close to billion users. Two people sign up every second. Still hear me out. The big secret is to know when to leave LinkedIn. LinkedIn has shown us the name of the person. And it showed us the name of the mutual connection. Now is the time to leave LinkedIn because in real life, what we are interested in is an interview. The interview is not going to happen on LinkedIn. LinkedIn just provided us with the names, and then we need to forget about the platform and get back to real life. So we, we land that position or start that discussion.

Neha:

Wow, that's quite insightful. So looking up people on LinkedIn, but moving on from there to actually network with them directly. And how can that be done in a remote-first world?

Daniel:

It could be, when you say you run a search and you find someone you'd like to reach out to, and you see that you do share a mutual connection with them, or several mutual connections with them. Then we, if you two are connected by visiting their profile and clicking on contact info, you would get their email. Simply leave LinkedIn. You send 'em a message. You ask how they've been. And at one point you page the link to the hiring manager or to the ideal prospect you'd like, and you ask them, do you know that person well enough?

Neha:

Okay.

Daniel:

And Neha, in some cases you could, you could guess because if your mutual connection has 300 connections, and the hiring manager has 400 connections, then chances are they know each other.

Neha:

Okay.

Daniel:

And if you spend 30 more seconds in, you see that they went to the same school, or they worked in the same location for the same company, it gives you also a probability of them knowing each other. And if you manage to have a meaningful introduction that can get you foot in the door, and that can start a meaningful process, hopefully leading to a contract.

Neha:

Wow. That's some great detective work there, Daniel. All right. So from career tips to, let's pivot to another key aspect of LinkedIn. Now, many of our listeners are consultants, or they work in small businesses, and I know you're an expert at getting clients from LinkedIn. So what are your top tips from, for business development on LinkedIn?

Daniel:

Okay, great. So I'll, I'll say this, there, there are two pillars. I think we need to consider. One is a converting profile. And the second is our connection strategy. So very quickly a converting profile will make your ideal reader understand what you bring to the table. And that your connection strategy should enable you to use or to leverage, or to ask people to introduce you to the hiring manager or to the ide...

Connect with Rocky:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rocky-buckley/

http://powerpersonaproject.com/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from a management accountant's perspective. Today, I'm speaking with Rocky Buckley, a personal branding consultant who helps experts maximize the value of their unique knowledge and skills. Rocky does a great job of demystifying the concept of a personal brand and explains how understanding and embracing your specialization helps management accountants and others thrive in a chaotic world.
 
Adam: (00:36)
Rocky, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate you coming on to share your expertise with us today. And so today we're gonna be kind of talking about personal branding and there's so many things happening in the world like pandemics, wars and in a lot of ways you have to kind of find a way to make yourself stand out in order to show the world, Hey, this is who I am, and this is how I want to go. And so kind of, maybe we can start off. Maybe you can define what does it mean? What does personal branding mean and why is it important for us?
 
Rocky: (01:06)
Yeah, well, personal branding is really an offshoot of branding itself, which, in a nutshell basically is a way to take a shortcut into people's minds, right? We're in a crowded marketplace. There's a lot of noise. We're bombarded with marketing messages all day long, all sorts of different inputs and the ability to stand out, as you said, to be able to sort of penetrate through all of that noise and cut through in a way that resonates with the type of person that we're we're targeting. It becomes very important to figure out a way to do that. So on a corporate level, you know, of course, branding is sort of that company's vision mission, what they're all about. And then all of that gets crystallized into, you know, visual form. It can be a logo, it can be a style, it can be a way that they communicate their message to the world.
 
Rocky: (01:58)
So when you take that to a personal level, the same sort of principles apply, what we're looking to do is take all of those aspects of ourselves that make us unique, different, you know, and really connect with that kind of person that we are for that we're really targeting at. And being able to kind of create a shortcut version of that, a crystallized version that somebody can very quickly get what you're all about and get whether or not they connect with you or not. And again, we're not looking to please everybody, but we are looking for those people that we are trying to connect with to resonate with us. And so, you know, when we talk about personal branding, you know, some people just naturally come across in a way that cuts through, right. They just have a big enough personality where they resonate with people, but for most of us, you know, it requires some conscious thought and design.
 
Rocky: (02:48)
It's sort of like thinking through, you know, what are those elements about me that are different? What are those aspects about what I do that I really want to convey very strongly? What's that sense of purpose maybe that I have, right. That makes me excited about what I do. So it's being strategic and kind of being able to figure all of that stuff out and then being able to distill it in a way that's constructed for public consumption, right, for other people to be able to get and get it really quickly. So that turns into, you know, your messaging and your visual branding and all of that kind of stuff. But ultimately we want a snapshot of ourselves that people will be able to kind of understand really quickly that simple, fast, you know, and easy and cuts through the noise.
 
Adam: (03:29)
It almost makes me think of that old fashioned elevator pitch that you would say, you know, if you're in an elevator, what would, you know, what could you say to somebody in that ride on the elevator in a sense, right?
 
Rocky: (03:38)
Yeah. Yeah. It is that really that fast because, you know, especially now as people are moving more online and the online market, as you just mentioned, pandemics and wars and stuff, it's really made people rethink their business. A lot of people have now decided to come online much more than they ever were before by necessity or by choice, right. When you step into the online marketplace, you know, you find it's even more crowded and you're connecting people through a scroll on a phone typically, or some kind of a timeline where, you know, if you're scrolling, let's say through Facebook, I mean, Facebook can only put so many people on your timeline, and it's basically a way to compress the world into this one narrow thing that people can scroll through. And so for you to be able to actually have somebody stop the scroll and actually pay attention to you for more than a few seconds, like that's a big deal and we've gotta master kind of the art and science of being able to know how to do that. Right. And so, yeah, the online marketplace is really, really crowded and yeah, more important than ever before. And it's just going to become more so, you know, there's billions of people in the world that haven't even come online yet, you know, so like it's, and the population of course is growing and so on. So being able to construct an effective personal brand that cuts through this is sort of a master skill that I think is only gonna become more important as time goes on.
 
Adam: (05:07)
So what I'm almost hearing you say, it's almost like we need to make ourselves like a specialist in a way to make sure that we stand out in that way. Does that make sense to make ourselves a specialist?
 
Rocky: (05:16)
Well, I think being a specialist is one aspect of a way to stand out. I think that specialization is more of a conversation about business model. I think there's a reason why we would wanna specialize beyond just the branding elements of it. Specialization allows us to do things like raise our prices a lot, charge a lot more. And it really affects then everything downstream in a business model. From a branding standpoint, yeah, specialization is one of those ways that allows you to filter all of the people potentially in the market and start to narrow those down into a slice that you can target very specifically. So for example, you know, a good, good example of that might be as if you were a doctor and you were a general practitioner, you know, versus specializing in one part of the body.
 
Rocky: (06:09)
Right. And so therefore, you know, you're gonna basically be for those people that are looking for that one thing, you know, I have a problem with my nose or something like that. And I'm looking for a nose doctor as opposed to a general practitioner. So when it comes to something like accounting, yeah. If you can specialize and be great in that one area, you're gonna cut down the potential number of people that you're trying to reach. And the potential people that are looking for you are gonna be able to find you much more easily because you're focused on that one thing. Yeah.
 
Adam: (06:42)
Hmm. That makes sense. Yeah. Cuz when I think about it, a lot of times accountants have to wear so many hats, especially if you're in a small to medium size business and you're a CFO or controller, you kind of have to be a jack of all trades. You have to do a lot of different things. And so there have to be ways to differentiate yourself in a way. So a lot of times people start with certifications, you know, IMA offers a certification, certifications are one way to kind of make yourself a speci...

In this special edition of Count Me In, we dive into trailblazing new DE&I research conducted in partnership by The Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), and The California Society of CPAs (CalCPA). The new report,  Diversifying Global Accounting Talent: Actionable Solutions for Progress, details more than 70 practices organizations can use to improve inclusivity and diversity among their workforces. Jeff Thomson, President and CEO of IMA is joined by Kevin Dancey, CEO of IFAC and Denise LeDuc Froemming, President and CEO of CalCPA to discuss the findings and why more than 60 professional accountancy organizations from around the world have signed on to the report as DE&I Advocates

Read the report Diversifying Global Accounting Talent: Actionable Solutions for Progress 

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountant's perspective. Today, we have a special edition as we take a closer look at the groundbreaking new DE&I solutions report produced in partnership by IMA, the International Federation of Accountants, or IFAC, and the California society of CPAs. The report, entitled Diversifying Global Accounting Talent: Actionable Solutions for Progress is now available on the IMA website. Just follow the link in the show notes. Here now to discuss the findings and why this report represents one, if not the largest collective of DE&I initiatives in the history of global accounting profession is Jeff Thomson, the president and CEO of IMA, Kevin Dancey, CEO of IFAC, and Denise LeDuc Froemming, president and CEO of CalCPA. Let's get started.
 
Jeff: (01:03)
Well, thank you so much, Kevin and Denise for joining this very, very important podcast. We're all committed to increasing the relevance and influence of our great profession and talent pipeline and talent retention, and certainly diversity, equity, and inclusion is an important part of that equation. I'm very, very proud and honored to have partnered with both IFAC and Cal state side of CPAs in this groundbreaking DE&I research our organizations have collaborated on over the past bunch of months. I believe that the breadth and depth of topics covered and really getting close to the issues at hand is arguably unsurpassed by any other study out there, but it's not a competition, it's about improving the profession and its its relevance and an age of disruption and uncertainty. You know, there were some hard truths, hard data points that came out of the surveys that we did both in the US and around the world, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
 
Jeff: (02:07)
Speaking about inequity, for example, fewer than 60% of the 8,000 sampled believe the profession is equitable or inclusive, that's a startling number. And so it very much is a call to action to partner together, to understand how we can create diverse pipelines, how we can create an incredibly diverse and inclusive profession because of an overarching perspective that improves the attractiveness of the profession to all types of individuals and our relevance and influence going forward is absolutely paramount. Look, we can't touch on every point in the research that came up in this particular podcast, but would love to hear your reactions. For example, to the more than 70 specific actionable practices recommended in the report. These over 70 actionable practices have been mapped back to the 17 UN sustainable goals, sustainability goals for 2030, for example, goals on quality education, gender equality, and reducing inequality.
 
Jeff: (03:14)
So let's talk about some of the findings and I need to be quiet and listen and learn. So according to the research, there is greater diversity across the broader profession than in leadership positions. In a comparison of female respondents, job titles, across all regions, to those of male respondents with similar education levels and experience, it was revealed that male respondents are holding more senior positions than in females. And that typically also extends to other diverse groups. Second, the research points to women and members of other diverse demographic groups in each region believing there is some level of inequitable treatment and exclusive behaviors that impacted career decisions and prompted some actually about 12% to actually leave our great profession. So starting with Denise as a leader in our profession, what is your reaction to the findings in this area of gender and other forms and inequities, inequalities, and similar challenges you're facing in a very diverse state of California. Denise?
 
Denise: (04:28)
Well, thank you first. Thank you, Jeff, for having me on the podcast today really appreciate being here and also thank you for just, we really appreciate partnering with IFAC and IMA on the survey. It's very important as you said, and there's a lot of great actionable items, which I was so happy to see within the survey, cuz it gives others a pathway to move forward. So that's important. You know, in regards to gender parity, I think COVID, we could all probably agree that it didn't really help on the advancement and the momentum that we had in 2019 on with women within the workforce. A lot of women left to take care of their families, no judgment there it's just what happened. It's the reality. Often I think women and diverse populations are underutilized within the profession. They aren't provided the opportunities to stand up and to learn new skills or competencies.
 
Denise: (05:24)
So I did talk to Dr. Mithu Dey from Howard University. And she had said too, that there's research out there. And she mostly looks at the black accountants and their experience, but she said advancement and retention challenges are really the result of them not obtaining assignments that help them develop. And they don't have the social networks a lot of times to provide that informal career advancement. And I think we could all agree. I know myself that I've benefited from others helping me to move ahead, giving me opportunities. And if you don't have that, that's definitely a gap. And it also provides you with the thought that maybe you wanna leave the profession because you don't have the network and you don't feel that sense of belonging or welcomed environment within maybe the organization that you're in. And there's a lot of statistics out there that really promote the fact that there is not equitable treatment all the time.
 
Denise: (06:24)
So a lot of times we say to see me is to be me. And I think, you know, Heather has said that at times as well, and it's really having that awareness and acknowledgement that there is a gap within the profession and understanding that gap. So you have to know where you're at to know where you need to go a lot of times. So it's, it's on the acknowledgement and awareness that the profession does have a gap. And then also the belief that there is an untapped resource out there and that will provide the leadership and the innovation to move the organization forward. And also having that as a priority within the organization and the tone at the top, making sure that it is within the fabric of the organization to have DE&I at the forefront and have programs that support that. So essentially having it hardwired within the organization.
 
Jeff: (07:17)
Right. Thank you, Denise so much. And you know, before I turn it over to Kevin, I think three of us would probably agree very, very passionately that we've got a great profession. We...

Connect with Nick: https://www.achievers-mindset.com/tools           

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountants perspective. I'm your, host Adam Larson. Today we are joined by Nick Davies, an executive coach to leaders and other professionals looking to take their expertise to the next level. At the heart of Nick's coaching philosophy is what he calls the achiever's mindset and how learning to harness that powerful mental tool can lead to transformative results for management accountants, and other go getters in both business and in life. I hope you enjoy the show today. Let's start the conversation with Nick.
 
Adam: (00:42)
So Nick, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We really appreciate you spending time with us. And today we're gonna be talking a little bit about the achiever's mindset, but before we get there, I'd like you to kind of give a little bit of your background for our audience today and how you got to the point where you are today.
 
Nick: (00:58)
How long have I got? You know, it's interesting. I was having this conversation yesterday with someone about talking about their story and fantastic story this lady had working in a business and it's something that I made a distinction of a long time ago that I had a resistance to share in my story. And I thought, well, who wants to hear my story, it's my story? And then what I realized was that, yeah, it's boring to me because it's my story, you know? So I always like it when people can share, because even if it feels like it's just your thing, it's like, well, other people haven't had that experience, you know? And so for me grown up in England, I worked for almost 20 years in the banking world all over the world. I've lived in three continents and five locations and been a long time doing something that I didn't really want to be doing and kind of went outside this personal development journey about 10, 12 years ago.
 
Nick: (01:51)
I asked myself like what did I wanna do when I grew up, you know, eventually moved to states and lived in Florida, worked on Wall Street for a while and, and decided that's it like I wanna, I like working with people. I wanna work with people working on what's most important for them, whatever it is, whatever industry, industry agnostic, but use my experience working in the corporate world and understanding how things work, but also work for people's goals that are most important to them. And so I'd ask to become a coach. And it's been an amazing journey over the last six or seven years. This point, coached hundreds of people, people walk different walks of life and a corporate setting, every different industry, business owners, non-business owners worked on more people's part of life. And it's something I get very passionate about now. And I'm privileged to do every day.
 
Adam: (02:35)
As you were talking, it kind of made me think about a lot of us are we may feel successful where we are in our careers, but despite having a pretty good handle on it, we feel like we're missing something, right. We feel like we're missing. We wanna be a top performer. And, but how do we get to the next level? So maybe that's kinda where we're gonna focus in on the conversation is how do we boost our skills and wherever we are, you know, this podcast is for folks, affecting the accounting and finance world. So accountants and folks in the accounting and finance world, how do we get to that next level? You know, we're not talking about specific accounting things right now, but it's just that, you know, how do we become successful in the next moment?
 
Nick: (03:12)
And I think that you talked about skills and you talked about, yeah, we don't wanna talk about the technicalities of mechanical and finance. That's not the point. And so what I found out, what I believe is that right. It really starts with, well, where do you wanna go? What type of person do you wanna create within yourself? What type of life do you wanna create, rather than looking for skills or practices or best practices or strategies it's like, let's start with the best version of what it could be. What if you could have it anyway, you would want it, like, what would that look like? And really start from that point. And oftentimes that comes with a resistance, like, well, what do you mean? I wanna get 10% better this year. I wanna get 20% better this year. It's like, well, that's great and good for you, no judgment. But what if you could flip it on its head? What if you could get a hundred times better? What would that mean? What actually does that look like for you? And if you're thinking with that end in mind, then you tend to find the path to get there.
 
Adam: (04:12)
So if you're thinking with that end in mind, how do you get to that, that change of mindset because you're here and you're like, I just wanna improve like 10% you said, and you just mentioned a hundred percent better. Like those seem like very drastically different numbers
 
Nick: (04:27)
Yeah, absolutely. Right. And some of it starts with being willing and something within, could you start to, to talk about, right? Like some of us consider ourselves successful, but maybe there's something niggling inside you go, well, maybe it's not quite what I want, or maybe I could be doing this in a different way. And it's really kind of leaning into some of that. And I believe that we all have it. And a lot of us go through a life scene, a little bit of a fog, sometimes a lot of a fog just doing what we think is the right thing to do. You know? And I think about when I got into banking, I felt was like, well, that's good. They wanna pay me to do this. All right. And I'll play your game. And then they're gonna pay me some more and I'll play some more, I'll get paid some more.
 
Nick: (05:09)
It's like, and it just goes and goes and goes. And that's really all, you know, and it's not often you just get to chance to step back and go, well, hang on. Is this really what I want? Like deeply to my core. Do I get excited to do this every day? Does it keep me up late? Not just because I'm told to, or that there's deadlines or is it cuz I want to, am I getting up early to go and practice to be the best version of this? And that's a question that like hand on heart that I believe most people can't answer. And I believe that that was just something that wasn't available for me. Like that wasn't the sort of person that I was. I thought that stuff was preserved for small stars or, you know, people that are in a creative field, but I believe it's available for everyone if you're willing to look.
 
Adam: (05:52)
Hmm. So if you're willing to look, maybe we can start talking about, can you define the achiever's mindset for us? And we can discuss that a little bit more.
 
Nick: (06:01)
Yeah. I think that, you know, the achiever's mindset is really about knowing that like there's always something else. There are no limits to what we can achieve. The baseline, the achiever's mindset for me is that I believe that anything's possible. If you think about what humans have achieved, just watching, me, my wife sat down last night to watch Netflix. We were watching the SpaceX documentary that was on there. And that what a great example, that is about what we could achieve. You know, even Elon Musk said, when we first started out, I thought there was a 10% chance. We'd get someone to orbit and it j...

Read the report here: Management Accountants’ Role in Sustainable Business Strategy: A Guide to Reducing a Carbon Footprint
Connect with the Speakers:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnaudbrohe/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaxiefriedman/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/regisedu/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
 Hello again, welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast exploring the world of business from the management accountants perspective. I'm Adam Larson and today we are discussing exciting new thought leadership from IMA, which shows how management accountants are on the front lines, making businesses more sustainable. The name of the report is Management Accountants Role and Sustainable Business Strategy: A Guide to Reducing Carbon Footprint. And I'm excited as brought some of the researchers and authors involved in the project here today, including Kristine Brands, management professor, the US Air Force Academy, Arnaud Brohe CEO of Agendi, a leading consultancy for climate and sustainability programs, and Jaxie Friedman, a sustainability consultant at Agendi. Make sure to follow a link in the show notes to access the full report. Let's start the conversation. 
 
 Adam: (01:03)
 So before we can talk about reducing carbon emissions for a company or for anybody, we kind have to start talking about the drivers that kind of led us up to this point that would make companies and other folks realize, Hey, I need to start paying attention to this and can, so let's start there. Kristine, can you, can you start that off for us? 
 
 Kristine: (01:21)
 Yes. Before I speak, I have a disclaimer because I work for the Air Force. The views that I am speaking about are entirely my own and do not reflect any policy or position from the Air Force, the Department of Defense or the US government. Drivers are huge and what astonishes me is the awareness and the rising of the consciousness of people towards climate change. And they take several dimensions of clearly external and the physical drivers, which are the data behind climate change and the astronomical risk that we're facing globally as a society. And that carries over to internal drivers, into organizations that are going to be put in a position, which I predict is going to come faster than people can imagine to address that risk as well as their strategy so that they can adapt and adjust and be agile to the threats that we're all facing as a society. 
 
 Adam: (02:34)
 Arnaud, Jaxie, do you have anything to share? 
 
 Arnaud: (02:37)
 Yeah. I agree with what Kristine said. I just think that people don't realize how fast this is going to evolve. But that's critical. Basically we have 10 years to change the way we consume, the way we produce, the way we are organized as a society. We have 10 years to start thinking about how to change our mobility systems, you know, shifting from thermite combustion engines to electric cars, that's going to be very visible, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, frankly. We have, we need to revolutionize the way we consume energy in factories, the way we consume energy in agriculture. So the changes are just enormous. The drivers of course are the physical climate risk, but that's not the first drivers that companies are going to experience what we see today and taking the automotive industry as one example, to trade is that transition risk are going to affect businesses even before physical risk and by transition risk I mean, the pressure that customers, the regulators, governments are putting on existing businesses. So if you are an automotive manufacturer today, and you wanna sell your car in no way, or the Netherlands or Germany, you better be ready to switch to much more efficient cars and to gradually shift 200% electric cars. And we know that these trends are going to come here as well in the US and in order jurisdiction.
 
 Jaxie: (04:03)
 Yeah. I think it's true. What both of you guys are saying that, you know, the science is showing it's, it's more and more significant and gonna be incredibly problematic, but I also think that there's in relation to that a lot of pressure coming from businesses and consumers as well, that is really driving this action. You know, of course it's true that the science is showing that more work needs to be done. But I also think that there's more awareness around that fact. So it's not just a matter of, you know, the, IPCC reports saying that, you know, there's targets we need to hit. It's also a matter of more public awareness that's trying to push us forward. And some of that is, you know, more just reputational. So investors encouraging companies to be integrating climate into their business strategies. Some of it is regulatory like Arnaud I were just speaking about kind of the SEC regulations and how there's kind of current movement towards there being potential regulatory requirements related to climate. And I think, you know, the fact that, you know, those new SEC kind of papers have come out to suggest that we're moving in that direction, I think is gonna be continuing to intensify the speed at which climate becomes integrated, not just into sustainability functions, but across entire business operations. 
 
 Adam: (05:44)
 So it almost seemed like you needed the customer and the government regulators to say something cuz otherwise businesses probably wouldn't have done anything. 
 
 Kristine: (05:54)
 I think you're absolutely right. There's been a lot of resistance. There is pressure. There's reputational pressure as was mentioned, but the real push is to pass the regulations which the European union has done. And there are daunting proposed regulations from the SEC. And I think that that's what is necessary to close the deal.
 
 Jaxie: (06:22)
 I think also, you know, it depends company to company. I think, you know, considering company culture is a really important factor. There's more and more businesses that really have sustainability within their DNA evolving as it's becoming a bigger part of our society as climate action is becoming more integrated at a public perspective. So I think in order to move the needle among kind of the mainstream body of companies, I think it's completely true that the regulatory pressure helps really push things along. But I also think it's important to acknowledge that there are many companies that have taken really huge steps in this direction before regulation was even on the table. And so I think it's important to consider that fact, I think that, you know, a lot of companies get a lot of or you know, with a corporate world in general, I think gets flack that they're, you know, the causing so much of the emissions and that they're, you know, the source of the problem, but the truth is like also, they're also a big part of the solution and they've been a real driver of innovation towards our climate solutions. 
 
 Jaxie: (07:31)
 And so I think it's important to acknowledge that I think regulation is not, it is a kind of like a compounding force, but I think even in its absence, there've been a lot of massive growth opportunities that have evolved because of companies that are really, you know, recognizing the need even without the enforcement. 
 
 Arnaud: (07:55)
 To compliment what Jaxie just said, that I would say we should stop thinking about ...

Connect with Gordon: www.intrepidbrotherhood.com

Full Episode Transcript: 
Adam: (00:06)
 I'm Adam Larson and welcome to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountant's perspective. Today, we are talking to author Gordon Graham about his memoir, the Intrepid Brotherhood: Public Power, Corruption, and Whistleblowing in the Pacific Northwest. This is a really fascinating story. Gordon was a senior technology leader at the public utility who uncovered blatant persistent corruption among executive management at the company. But while others accepted the corruption as an unfortunate fact of life, Gordon fought hard for change, even in the face of fierce retaliation from the executive wing. His decision to fight and ultimately become a whistleblower, provides a riveting example of the lengths people will go to on both sides of an ethical dilemma. Here's my conversation with Gordon Graham.
 
 Adam: (01:01)
 So Gordon, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I really appreciate you coming on and let me just start by saying, you have just an amazing story that you wrote about in your book, and I hope we'll get to hear a little bit about it today, but one of the biggest items that you talk about is standing up for what is right. And now this can be especially hard when you feel like the weight of an organization or a local government on you and you probably feel very alone. Can you give us your take on standing up for ethical professional treatment at the expense of one's career?
 
 Gordon: (01:32)
 Difficult choice, to say the least. I think one of the reasons I wrote the book was just so people who may be experiencing the same thing or recognize, and same characteristics in their organization can have something to refer to help them try to determine how they can help their organization, maybe get out of that circumstance, how they can help themselves, maybe the people within the span of control that they have, or have responsibility for. They can help them deal with it. It's a very personal choice to decide to actually confront those issues. If you recognize 'em in your organization. And a lot of people are going to choose differently than I did. My circumstances sort of dictated that I needed to personally dedicate myself to trying to help the organization that I had invested so many years in.
 
 Gordon: (02:33)
 I really feel like I didn't have any choice. There was no other decision for me to make. And unfortunately even though I exercised what I think were the right steps, the right maneuvers to try to get people's attention, to build recognition of the problem, I failed at that. I have to admit that I didn't get that done. And in the end it caused me to have to change my employer, my career path a little bit, I had to relocate, a whole bunch of things happened, but that's, you know, I really can't advise anyone on specific approach or steps to take to you know, ultimately deal with that situation if they recognize it in their organization. But hope hopefully the book provides some tools to evaluate how to make that decision.
 
 Adam: (03:29)
 Definitely. I mean, that must have been a very tough decision to make, especially job location and friends I'm sure. And like community, you had to kind of disrupt everything just to make that decision that you made.
 
 Gordon: (03:43)
 That's correct. Yeah. There was a lot of circumstances and factors that weighed into our decision. I say our, because my wife played a huge part in that analysis to say the least. So yeah it really was life changing and, you know, I would've rather that it would've resolved differently, but that's just the way things evolved. And we made the choice that we did because we felt it was the right one.
 
 Adam: (04:17)
 Yeah. So let's say I'm in a similar position and I'm starting to see signs of abusive leadership somehow in a management position at the company I'm at, you know, what steps should I take? Like what are the steps that someone should take when they start to see those things?
 
 Gordon: (04:35)
 So if you recognize some of the things that I've outlined or specified in the book are happening in your organization coincidentally, I just, I just did at the request of my self-publishing company, I just did kind of a deep dive into that very subject and came up with a piece that will be shared with people that joined my email list and that type of thing. And there are certain things that I think constitute the right way to approach trying to resolve that in your organization. The first one I believe, and probably the most effective, if it is successful is to approach the individual or individuals that you think may be in control of the situation. So if it is your CEO, if it is your general manager that is truly turning the company upside down, or at least in your perception is doing that.
 
 Gordon: (05:33)
 I think that's the first place to go. What better place to resolve it than right at the source, if you can gain some recognition and at least get the conversation started about, you know, why maybe you are misperceiving things. Although in most situations, if you recognize the things that were happening in my story, I don't think you're misperceiving anything, but at least to try to raise awareness with that individual or those individuals and get them to think about what may be the long term consequences, if it can be resolved at that level. I think that's probably the best solution. Failing that, or at least not achieving the level of success you might have liked. I think the next resource might be peers in your organization. So if you are at a mid or senior management level, there are other people that are in your group, so to speak, that you must interface with on a regular basis.
 
 Gordon: (06:37)
 And if you can gain some recognition amongst that group, then you can sort of initiate an intervention, so to speak. So you've got a group of people who are of a like mind that can approach upper management or the senior management and let them know what you are observing collectively and what you think would be a better path to pursue. If you can't build that coalition, then the next place would probably be to try to get the attention of one or more of the elected board members, appointed or elected, however your board is constructed. There's really nobody else in the organization that should care more about oversight and really nobody that has more responsibility for that function. So if you can get the attention of at least one of those individuals, then I think they can actually spread the word amongst the rest of the board members and try to intervene and maybe right the ship so to speak.
 
 Gordon: (07:58)
 So that's probably the next best place and then failing all of those things. You're kind of in my situation or the situation I was in. And really the only alternative I had at that point was to take my case to the public. And, you know, that ultimately ended up in blowing the whistle and having to file a petition to protect my employment, which ultimately failed. But that's the last resort. And I certainly can't advise anyone to take that step. The other alternative or the last alternative, I guess, to that step would be to just check out mentally or physically, you may just resign yourself to the fact, you're not gonna be able to change anything, move on to a different position, if you can find one. And there's a lot of advice out there in the community to do just exactly that, if you can't thrive at your job, if you are being harassed, if you're being subject...

Connect with Bruno: https://www.pesec.no/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam (00:05):

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accounting perspective. I'm Adam Larson, and our guest today is Bruno Pešec. As you've probably noticed, we talk quite a bit about innovation here at Count Me In. After all, it's the mechanism for how companies create new products and services to drive profitable growth. Bruno is an engineer by training and an expert in helping companies think systematically about where continuous improvement ends and how robust innovation begins. His insight about how management accountants fit into the picture can often upend conventional wisdom, which makes this a discussion you do not want to miss. Let's get started.

Adam (00:53):

Bruno, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Really appreciate having you on as we discuss innovation within the corporate sector. And one thing I wanted to kind of start with is, you know, we've gone through almost two, three years of a global pandemic and organizations are really struggling to keep afloat, whether keep afloat, figuring how to use hybrid work from home, not work from home. Where does innovation sit in the midst of all this, as we're trying to restructure what the world looks like as we go forward?

Bruno (01:22):

So Adam first happy to be here. And second, great opening question. If I might add what I really well, I want to say what I really love about the last three years, but that's a wrong choice of words. So I will rather say what has became obvious in the last three years are good and bad habits in handling disruption and not just innovation, those companies and business leaders that were innovative before all these big changes happened, fared better, not because they had the best ideas or they had the coolest products, but because the process of innovation is the process of handling uncertainty. So they developed a skillset and capabilities that allowed them to handle this uncertainty. And innovation is one of those words. You know, you ask 10 people what it means you're gonna get 20 definitions. So I'm not here to tell you or your audience, what is the definition of innovation, but I want to share what is my take on innovation?

Bruno (02:24):

So whomever is listening that they know what am, what am I actually thinking when I use those words. So in the broadest terms, I consider innovation to be something new that creates value. Something new, not to the history of mankind, but new to your customers and to your organization. That's enough to qualify as new and value must be two by directional. So it needs to create value for the customers. Something that we have gradually gotten better at, but it also must create value for the organization. What sense does it make to create new product services and business models? If they drive you out of business? And this is where our accounting friends are very, very useful, sometimes maybe underappreciated, but back to your question. So the companies that were already innovative before they coped much, much easier in this disruptive periods, why? Because they were able to actually go back to their customers and learn how did their reality change, how people were buying and using your product could have changed overnight, just look at hospitality industry.

Bruno (03:34):

So everything dramatically changed. Incumbents, like big hotel chains or even smaller motel chains. They were just adjusting to what happened with Airbnb, booking, hotels.com and all these disruptors and bomb. Then COVID came and suddenly the whole industry was flipped upside down. And those that actually managed to stay afloat, they used a lot of different tactics, basically repurposing the whole venues for something else. So that, that was a good example of how did they handle disruption? What I've especially seen the companies that didn't handle it well, did all the same things. One, they tried to weather the storm. They said, okay, this is going to blow away in three months, six months, nine months, two years, three years, who knows how long, but they basically said we have our fat, we have our supplies. We have our business, let's just try to weather the storm.

Bruno (04:32):

Basically put our hand heads into the sand. That did not work. The only thing that we have seen is that all our projections were pretty much wrong. What we expected to be weeks than months turned into, well, we are in the third year, but we have a war that kind of is even more disruptive. So people are looking more to that. Another thing is besides trying to weather the storm was ignoring the changes in reality. So kind of just assuming that the strategy you had before the business model you had before the product portfolio you had before that it's still valid and kind of trying to keep optimizing that, you know, sending people home, working from home, hoping that will be lower operational expenses, but still keep the same revenue that did not work out so well.

Bruno (05:24):

And the third one was a failing to adjust the leadership mode. So what was really and remains very important in this period are leaders that are also able to provide this emotional and psychological safety. So kind of the leader doesn't need to have all the answers that's sometimes not even desirable, but the leader should always be able to say, I'm here for you. We gonna figure it out together. And those that were not able to kind of maintain that, that were not able to direct their crew in the right direction. No, the people suffered a lot emotionally, then that spills over into family spills over then back to the company on the performance. So these are kind of the things that I will highlight just at the top of the pile.

Adam (06:12):

For sure. Yeah. There's a lot, that's at the top of the pile and I'm sure more trickles down as we get into the conversation. So you start with what you kind of talked about, you know, where you kind of have to adapt leaders have to adapt. People have to adapt. The company needs to adapt companies that were innovating before have to continue innovating. They're probably a better set. So what about, you know, when you look at innovation like some, and you said something new that creates value is your definition of innovation, which I think is a great definition, but those outcomes, they can't be guaranteed. So how do you measure it? How do you measure that within an organization, especially when you have all these new factors, there's a lot of new things, a lot of new things that could create value are happening right now. So how do you measure all of those elements?

Bruno (06:58):

Yeah. Yeah. So Adam, I mean, I could probably be talking about this question for days, but we don't have days. So I'm going to focus on a couple of things. You nail the problem straight on the head. So what is specific for innovation is that no one can guarantee outcomes. Like it doesn't matter if you do everything by the book, if you follow the best innovation processes, you can still end up with a product service or even the whole failed project that there was no return on investment. But what we do have in control is the expense side, the organization side, the work side, what ideas do we select? What ideas do we prioritize over others? How do we fund these ideas? How do we control these ideas? What people do we put on them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Bruno (07:54):

So...

Today we go inside the financial transformation process at Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS) with CFO John Greene. John joins Adam Larson to discuss how Discover’s focus on innovation and corporate culture has empowered the finance team to be better business partners to the entire organization.

Connect with John: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-greene-/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that looks at business issues and trends from the management accountant's perspective. Today, we are speaking with John Greene, the CFO of Discover Financial Services, the company behind the Discover credit card and the television ads with the catchy tagline, "We Treat You Like You'd Treat You". I'm sure you've heard the term financial transformation before, which is basically the process of bringing digital tools and technology to the finance team inside organizations. Today, we are gonna look at how that process actually works at Discover and why it's critical to strike the right balance between driving innovation and making sure team members feel empowered along the way. Let's get started. 
 
Adam: (00:51)
So, John, I just really want to thank you for coming on the podcast today. It's, really a pleasure to have you on and today our focus is gonna be around finance and innovation and how those two connect together. And so as we start off, I just want to ask what are your guiding principles when it comes to finance and innovation and how they connect.
 
John: (01:08)
Great. Adam, great to be here. So, you know, my guiding principles are first, we want to make sure we have the right people and the right sort of jobs. So by that, I mean, people with the right skillset, the right values, high level of integrity that are working towards a common mission, which would be to going to benefit our customers and the organization and the financial outcomes that we're seeking. So that's really, really important. And being able to connect the organization mission to individual objective's really, really important, both from an innovation standpoint, as well as from a team building standpoint. And then the second guiding principle would be to ensure we have the right organization design and the right structure to make people successful. So that includes having the right level of technology, the right commission, the right focus on innovation in order to have people feel like they're empowered to be able to make the changes that we're seeking to drive within the organization.
 
Adam: (02:19)
But then when you look at innovation from an organizational perspective, is there like a definition of what counts as innovation? And then what does that look like for each employee?
 
John: (02:29)
Yeah, so for me, innovation is a really, really broad concept. It can be as simple as changing the way we do do something on a day to day basis, which would be innovative, or it can be leveraging technology in entirely different way or leveraging new technology to drive innovation. So, you know, a couple examples of kind of changing the way we've done things here at Discover, without the benefit of technology would be, you know, our journal entry process. So we were doing almost two, 2000 journal entries a month. Every time we closed the books and through some process redesign some change of policies, as well as taking a different look at how we focused on certain accounts, we reduced the number of journal entries we did on a monthly basis by about 40%.
 
John: (03:33)
So, think about it. That is, that is 400 entries that, you know, someone doesn't have to kind of put together, get the backup file, and then review. So, you know, without technology, a high degree of innovation there in terms of process redesign, we did the same. We did the same sort of thing with our FPNA, processes. So think budgeting and forecasting. We, took a look at what was important for the organization, how timely we needed updates on, where the company was going financially. And we eliminated, one third of the forecast we were doing. So what went down from six to four, what it did is it freed up capacity to spend time on analytics. Now, there are two examples that involved process redesign, not necessarily technology.
 
Adam: (04:34)
Now we've deployed RPA, so we call them bots here in Discover and, you know, that has also enabled us to further reduce journal entries. It has also taken manual work out of a number of different areas within the finance organization. So, that that's been a win. And on top of it, we switched out from an old McCormick and Dodge, general ledger system, and just implemented, Oracle cloud, here. We put it in about, a year and a half. It went in, frankly, in a really, really smooth way on time under budget, but what that's enabled us to do is take out nearly half the cost centers we have here. So, the combination of kind of process redesign and leveraging technology and new technology we've really changed the way we work. And we freed up significant amount of time to analyze the business rather than tell the business or report on what has happened in the business.
 
Adam: (05:46)
So as you've freed up that time to analyze, have you seen, have you already been seeing the benefits from even team morale being able to change their job description of, Hey, I'm going to stop these 400 extra journal entries to analyzing something else, has that improved even just employees as they get to do new things?
 
John: (06:09)
Yes. Actually, so, you know, change can be, you know, harder on some people than others. And so what, what we've tried to do here is focus on a culture of, of creating positive change that will improve analytics and efficiency without the risk of job loss. So in the situation we're in right now, we have a level of normalized turnover, just like every organization does. And we've been able to absorb that turnover redesign, you know, people's kind of responsibilities or organizations without impacting kind of employment in a negative way by that. I mean, you know, we haven't had wholesale layoffs or reductions. What we've done is enrich people's jobs by taking out what I'll say is more transactional or non-value work. And, you know, that's translated into some positive results on our engagement surveys. And I feel like it's really been beneficial in terms of motivating some folks as we've been able to expand job responsibilities.
 
Adam: (07:23)
That's amazing to hear that that's the initiative you've taken. I know that I'm sure the employees appreciate it, but it's also an innovative way of, looking at the human capital and investing in them as opposed to just slashing them and saying, well, we need to get rid of them.
 
John: (07:39)
Yeah. And you know, lot of credit for that is to the organization, in the entirety. So Discover spent, you know, decades trying to create the right balance of financial performance and culture. And, you know, the folks that come here, I think have enjoyed that aspect of the culture in terms of trying to create an atmosphere that, you know, operates with as little bias as possible, that values innovation, that if values change, but also respects kind of human capital and tries to create the best experience for our teams.
 
Adam: (08:22)
So you've been talking about the great improvements and innovations that have happened through technology and other ways that, you know, have helped the journal ledgers and using RPAs and bots. But what changes have you noticed in your responsibilities, and expectations, especially during these last two years with COVID?
 
John: (08:41)
Yeah, so great question. So, you...

Connect with Braden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/braden-cadenelli-a0737b108/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam (00:05):

I'm Adam Larson and welcome to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountants perspective. Coming up, I speak with Braden Cadenelli about the realities of implementing sustainability practices in the food industry.

Adam (00:20):

Braden is a professional baker in pastry chef who runs six state-of-the-art test kitchens for Puratos, a company which makes ingredients and products for bakers patissies, and chocolatiers around the world. This podcast helped me understand how sustainability practices must be baked into the financial planning and budgeting process at companies in order to drive long term value. And Braden is finding that management accountants are excited to work with him on his sustainability issues, especially when he brings the treats. Let's listen in now. Braden, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise with us. And as we jump in to get started we know that many businesses are dealing with the reality that adopting sustainable business practices is really what's needed to be successful in the future and also is what's needed for our planet. Can you share a bit about your story, about how you came to see that this is a need and how you started the process with your company?

Braden (01:20):

Of course, Adam, thank you so much having me on today. I really appreciate it. And I'm excited to get to share and talk about a subject that I'm very passionate about, and that is sustainability and specifically sustainability within the food industry. There's really for our specific company where I work. We're Puratos, we're a bakery ingredient company. There's really two specific factors that have led us to our sustainability initiatives. The first one is that we are a family-owned company and the second generation of those families is starting to move into leadership roles within the company. And sustainability is a very important topic to younger people. Not to say it wasn't on the radar of the generations before not to say it wasn't important. It's even more important to the leaders who are coming up now, not only through our company, but in other companies as well.

Braden (02:18):

The second is consumer demand. We work in the food industry. There's a large demand over the past 10 to 15 years to clean up food. And a lot of people say they want to have food labels where they can pronounce everything on that label. If you're going to put that focus on cleaning up your food label and caring so much about the food you are creating as a food manufacturer, you have to care about how you're creating it. You have to care about every step of the system that gets you to that final finished product. And what that means is nowadays you have to have a sustainable system if for no other reason so that you can continue to be a successful business in the marketplace.

Adam (03:11):

I can see how that would be super important, especially if you're listening to your customers. Has it been difficult to start that path as especially with, you know, you're listening to your customers, but you also have to worry about your bottom line. So there's so many different things that you have to weigh. What has that process been like? Especially, you know, obviously this is a podcast for accountants, you know, what's this been look like as you're looking at your bottom line, working with your finance team, trying to see what is the best way to do this?

Braden (03:40):

Well specifically in my role. So to fill the listeners in a little bit, I manage a network of test kitchens within the United States and we have six test kitchens. That means I also have a little bit of a reach into some of our other practical physical facilities. When I work directly with our finance team in this aspect, it's all about long term planning. It is all about targeting the solutions that are going to work for our kitchens, and then making sure that we have the financial capital to be able to implement those solutions. So it's really, I have monthly meetings with the finance team, making sure that I am telling them what it is that I'm going to be looking into purchasing why I need to make these purchases and building out a proper budget. A lot of my job around sustainability is actually around budgeting and making sure that I'm doing the research and I'm talking to the right industry people and finding the right solutions and then finding ways to plan for them.

Adam (04:43):

That's great. So you have a really good relationship with your finance team then, because obviously if you didn't, you wouldn't be able to work on this project at all.

Braden (04:51):

Exactly. No, I'm very lucky. I mean, sometimes I have to bribe them with a cake or a cookie or a brownie if I really, you know, annoy them, if I forget to submit a report on time or if I forget to put a project through in power steering the right way. Generally speaking though. Yeah. We have a great relationship. It's really, for me, very interesting to get, to see that side of the business and get to play a role in planning out these long term projects and what the finances for those mean.

Adam (05:22):

So as you've become a partner with that team, are there other teams that you've had to kind of become a bridge with to kind of make this project a success?

Braden (05:32):

Yes. That's a great question because you cannot accomplish anything in any kind of business. It doesn't matter food industry or not. You cannot accomplish anything without learning how to partner with and work with other departments and other people. I heard a great saying once, and it was said to catch people's attention and it was all business is personal. And a lot of people, especially if you grew up watching eighties movies, you go, well, what about all those movies where they just said, oh, it's nothing personal. It's just business.

Braden (06:01):

All business though is personal because you're conducting business with other people. So what I've had to do is I've had to, A.) Get buy in from my own department, because when we're talking about sustainability, we're talking about changing people's daily activities because we are changing or removing resources that they are used to having. So I need to find solutions that they'll buy into. And so that they see the long term vision of this. I then have to sell the finance team on why we need to budget for this. For example, let's say we need to remove one use disposable item, but we need the CapEx to purchase a reusable item in its place, reusable that involves a capital expenditure, right. Something that I'm gonna use once and throw away. That's more OPEX. I control. I'm lucky I control OPEX for my department. I only have a small say in CapEx, right?

Braden (06:59):

The other people that I really have to have buy in from is our engineering team. They're the ones who are out there helping me, scour the industry and look for solutions. And then helping me implement the solutions. Because if we're talking again from a financial perspective, it's not only the solution. If I'm replacing, let's say a piece of technology, let's say a piece of bakery equipment that is very heavy in a certain type of utility usage. I need the tradespeople to take out the old machine. They need to install the new machine. There's an entire part of that process that isn't necessarily seen by everybody, but I need to worry about it and...

Connect with Sergio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lutav/

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha (00:05):

Welcome to Count Me In. I'm Neha Lagoo Ratnakar. And today I'm speaking with Sérgio Tavares about design thinking and why it's crucial for leaders and management accountants to understand the basics of design thinking in a digital-first business world. Sérgio is a design leader at Frog where he researches humans, culture and society to create digital solutions that better meet consumer needs. This is a very interesting conversation as we discuss how management accountants can help shape the metrics and what data designers should be focusing on to alleviate pressure points and deliver better digital solutions. So let's get started with Sérgio.

Neha (00:53):

Welcome Sérgio. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show. Now let's start with the basics for people who might be new to design thinking. Can you give us a simple definition of design thinking?

Sérgio (01:05):

Hi, Neha. Thanks for having me on the show. I think design thinking is a term that came about already in the sixties and it talks a lot about what is the customer need, the end customer need? I think we came from an era of advertising and marketing that we're more trying to persuade the people to want certain things, to consume certain products and design thinking, subverted that by looking into what they really need the things they know they need, but also the things that they don't know yet that they need and supplying these needs.

Neha (01:45):

Wow. Okay. I love that. And I'm totally going to steal that in my next conversation.

Sérgio (01:49):

Great.

Neha (01:51):

All right. So I like how design thinking it keeps customers in the center and what are the challenges that companies these days are facing when it comes to this customer centricity?

Sérgio (02:04):

Yes, that's, that's an excellent point. I think many companies are finding a lot of challenge to compete with the startup scene. I think the startup scene is going through a change now. We're a little bit past the move fast break things time. So we are seeing the downfall of the first unicorns we had. We crash Zuckerberg had so many problems with democracy and then the whole thing with the fake news. And there's, there's all the ups and downs with Elon Musk going to Twitter. So there's a lot that is telling us that this first wave or this wave was over and companies are now need to compete in a different way with startups. I think that the challenge that companies are facing is also that startups, they have very well understood that they need to look into the customer needs.

Sérgio (03:07):

And it's very simple for them to do that. They just get out of the building as the jargon says and run interviews fast prototypes and then create their product or improve their product. And then when you come to AB corporation, this is very difficult because there's so much procurement hierarchy and it becomes very difficult to just move very fast. So when it comes to customer centricity, I think that is where startups have an advantage and companies have problem because they need to output the results. They need to push harder, their marketing efforts, their existing efforts, and rethinking their products around the customer is something quite demanding.

Neha (03:53):

Right. Wow. That, that was very insightful. And when you talk about being customer centric, how does that translate to being customer centric within the organization? For example, how does your work at Frog apply this customer centricity internally?

Sérgio (04:10):

Yes. I think the first thing that we come as a Frog consultant, for example, we come to a customer is like, tell me where the research room is. And that usually means that there is no room. And so that means that we need to structure that. So we need to ask first let's run a round of questions, a survey out there to your target customers or to a specific segment you want to work with. And that means also that this research that you order it'll fall into an empty drawer. So you need to create the drawer. You need to create a structure that will catalog and categorize research and put it into use in product development or marketing or on the operations. So I think that's the first thing.

Neha (05:05):

So building the airplane as you fly it.

Sérgio (05:10):

Yes, yes, exactly. That just gives us a bit of speed and it's easier to show that we are getting insights about the customers. We're getting ideas on how to make our product more desirable, viable, usable for customers. And that's usually a good way to start because in corporations, you need to start convincing like the whole hierarchy. So it starts to connect with the KPIs and it starts to need to connect to the financial numbers.

Neha (05:43):

Right.

Sérgio (05:44):

So it's not very easy to sell, like, okay, in 10 years this idea will pay off, but you can start by saying, let's discover what we can do to change things right now, and how a better experience, for example, of a digital service will mean less time that people take to let's say, use our product. And that means faster onboarding, and that means more revenue, right? So when you start to create this connection, that's when design thinking connects with financial departments management consultants and so forth. These connections are quite new designers. They were often seen as the creative side, and they are usually with high fly ideas. That won't be very sustainable. But when we start to work with business consultants that that's started to change.

Neha (06:42):

And you're right, the perspective on design is changing everywhere. I've also heard people talk about customer journey maps and our listeners who are many of them are from accounting and finance world, would like to understand how that helps clients with the accounting, most importantly, but also their KPIs, OKRs, metrics and operations, the hard facts of a business.

Sérgio (07:09):

Yes. So the customer journey is basically a map of all the interactions that the end customer goes through when interacting with your product or service. So that may seem very far fetched from accountants, but I would think it's not, for example, in a model that I have developed with the client during this year we have throughout the journey, all the pain points and highlights through the experience. So let's think of a, let's say a bank or an insurance company or any service, really. So you have a person that is first deciding if they're going to buy it, then they let's say in case of an insurance, then you have the time that a person's gonna make a decision. If they're gonna get a more premium account. And then they have another part of their journey where they're actually making a claim.

Sérgio (08:05):

So all these the customer goes through all these, what happens often is that the designers or the people taking care of the product are looking a lot on the customer pains. And they are telling for example, the company customers need to be able to claim very fast for where they have some, a broken, broken device at home. So we need to make this very easy. And then on the other side, you have the accountants, for example, that are saying, look if we make this just immediate, we're gonna have more fraud. So I developed this model where we add to the customer journey, the pressure points that are internal to the company, pressuring the solution stores customers. And then we can have a real...

Contact Michael Teape: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teapetraining/

Teape Training International (TTI): https://www.teapetraininginternational.com

Get my FREE eGuide 7 Best Facilitation Tips to Ensure Engagement & Learning to ensure your Online Training Success -> https://tti-signup.ck.page/eguide

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In. I'm Adam Larson. Today, we welcome back Michael Teape to the podcast. Michael is a well known management coach and co-founder of Teape Training International. And he is here today to discuss how businesses can maximize their human capital, as we begin year three of COVID 19 era, and the Great Resignation continues. If you are a leader, trying to get your team back to business as usual, you do not wanna miss this insightful conversation. So let's get started. 
 
Adam: (00:38)
Michael, we really appreciate you coming on our podcast today. It's a pleasure to speak with you again, to have you come back to count me in. 
 
Michael: (00:45)
Thank you. It's great to be here, Adam. Thanks for having me back. 
 
Adam: (00:48)
Definitely. So let's just jump right into our topic today. So in your work with clients across businesses, how are people doing with the crisis as what we are heading into, what, the third year of it? 
 
Michael: (01:00)
Yeah. Can you believe it three years? No, that's just, yeah. Crazy. Well, it, every year it's changed. Right? Cause you can imagine that and as your listeners reflect back, they're gonna think, well, yeah, there was absolutely in the beginning, we didn't know what we didn't know. We were washing our vegetables, you know, we weren't going to the store and now we're way beyond that. We're managing that with seen threat come into our work. People have got COVID people have not gone to the hospital. Some have, unfortunately, so you've experienced it over two years. And as we come into the third, it's kind of normalized. It's baked in, it's like you get used to your environment. So, you know, most people are like, well, this is a reality, Adam, if I'm honest, that's what they're saying. 
 
Michael: (01:50)
And they're, going back to doing well, you know, may as well do the training. And from my point of view, you know, as a learning development specialist, face to face stuff was canceled the first year. And now in the third year, it is back on again, you know, they wanna do face to face. Haven't done it in a while. I'm not so sure that the employees want to do face to face. Cause they've got used to the virtual environment and they've worked out that actually it can work. It does work. We've been able to talk over, you know, over a virtual, just as much in fact, better than face to face, because face to face, most people wearing a mask, depending on which state you go to, depending on their level of infection. Yeah. So, you know, that's where we are right now. 
 
Michael: (02:44)
Also what I'm seeing Adam is people are moving jobs, you know, you've heard of the Great Resignation. So that's the other thing is really picking up speed now in the third year. The thing with that is that people are seeing opportunity. There is opportunity. So they're realizing that, well, I can work from home so therefore I can work pretty much from anywhere. Right? Yeah. So it doesn't, they're not as limited as they were before. So that's how people, I feel people are expanding their horizons on the work they can do and getting so much more comfortable with doing at home. So we've entered this era of flexibility. Unfortunately, last thing I'll say. And if, and those of you listeners who are leading others, I would say, this is that they're not being flexible. All right. So leaders have got to continue to be flexible. 
 
Michael: (03:41)
Even with the picture, the move back to the office. We want all of you back in the office, right? We want you all to come back and, you know what, we're losing some of that flexibility we've had for the last two years in this third year. And I feel that if leaders learn to continue the flexibility, they can continue to take advantage of a more flexible workforce and make them want to stay, want to work if you put in what I call, yeah. Of fake rules, unnecessary rules. Unnecessary. And I'll give you an example. There's a company that I know that remain nameless. They're like, right! We're all coming back to work. They've all been hundred percent remote, fairly small company. And right. We want all back at work, but we want you in Monday, Thursday and Friday, you can, you know, we'll be virtual Tuesday and Wednesday. 
 
Michael: (04:38)
You're getting these unnecessary rules and you must have your meetings. We want them face to face. So you need to have your meetings on the Monday, Thursday or the Friday. So you can imagine employees are like, hang on a minute. What if I wanna have a meeting on Tuesday, it creates all these unnecessary rules and decisions to be made when wouldn't, it have been easier just to say to the each team work out what days you wanna come in the office. We want to build up to a hundred percent back, but you know, happy to do 60, 40, whatever works as long as we're serving the client internally and externally, you know, I leave it up to your best judgment to make sure the work continues. Great, right? And then they can work on it. What works best for them? I'm seeing this over and over again. So how are people doing the crisis? I think they're doing quite well. They they're normalized it. They're getting on with it. They're looking for opportunities, other jobs. What we've gotta is being overly formal with how leaders bring their people back and teams back. We need to stay flexible. 
 
Adam: (05:46)
Yeah. So I can't imagine staying flexible would allow you to keep your workforce better because if you become more rigid, it says, well, if you're gonna be rigid, then I can just move on. Are there other tips that we can offer? Like for, you know, if you're thinking, okay, I lead a team, how can I adapt my team so that I can continue like being flexible, but what are other things that I can do to help keep my team together, but still be productive? 
 
Michael: (06:13)
The productivity is a funny thing. Yeah. So that's the first thing I'm gonna talk about here. Is it relax? Have they been productive for the last two years? Look at that. Has the performance been where you wanted it? If it is, you don't have a productivity problem. Yeah. If it isn't, then let's get into more communication with the team about your expectations. So focus. I think leading through this time now back to where people feel that COVID, isn't a day to day occurrence, or there's not another wave or they don't know tons of people that have it, getting people back, they really need to focus on what they want to achieve. And the way you do that with teams is you communicate with them. You ask them how it's going. You set expectations of what you're looking for. 
 
Michael: (07:05)
And then you coach them. You're really, really good at communication on, well, how are you prioritizing? How can I help you prioritize what you need to be doing in this time? What are some of the roadblocks getting in your way is for that leader to switch from, "I've told you my expectations" into a coaching style an...

Connect with Bharat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bharat-kanodia-asa/

Tedx - https://youtu.be/zicGCnM8Hag

YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/whatsitworth

Blog - https://www.inc.com/author/Bharat-Kanodia

Full Episode Transcript:

Adam: (00:06)
Welcome to Count Me In I'm Adam Larson. And today we're exploring the art and science of business valuations with Bharat Kanodia, the founder and chief appraiser at Vatra and Silicone Valley. Bharat has valued over 2000 businesses and unique assets, including Uber, Airbnb, and the Golden Gate Bridge. In our conversation today, he shares his insights on how company founders can seek to maximize their valuations and the key questions to ask venture capitalists before taking their money. It was so exciting to get an insider look at this process that drives so many of the innovations and companies in our lives. So let's get started Bharat. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to meet with us. And today we're going to be talking about valuations and venture capital and all that. So, just to start off, why, do valuations matter to a startup when you're just getting started?
 
Bharat: (01:10)
Adam, thank you so much for having me. Startups never have a profit and they're lucky if they have a product or customers yet they need to attract investors, employees, and customers. So how do they do that? They do that by using a pie in the sky currency called valuations. And so company raised so and so money at this and this valuations, that's a pie in the sky. That's just, you know, way for them to attract people. That's their marketing almost nowadays.
 
Adam: (01:50)
So is that actually accurate? Like how, how many times is that valuation actually accurate when you actually find out what the profit of the company over a certain period of time?
 
Bharat: (02:00)
Well, accuracy used to be absolute back in the day, but now accuracy is measured in shades of gray, if you will. So yeah, I mean, you know, somebody cut a check for that valuation. So who am I to say that number is not accurate? It is accurate, but I would say it is inflated. and the reason it is inflated is because say, if somebody paid, raised $5 million and the evaluation is a hundred million, they paid only a $5 million for a fraction of the company. So they extrapolating that 5 million to a hundred million. Now, if somebody were to buy the entire company, would they pay a hundred million dollars? Probably not. It's kind of like difference between wholesale and retail. If I buy one cup, it's $5. If I buy 50 cups, it might be a dollar a cup.
 
Adam: (02:57)
That makes sense. So that would be why a lot of valuations that you see, especially like when you hear about 'em on in the news, that would make sense why they're so high. So many times
 
Bharat: (03:07)
They are high all the time, bebecause plus they also wanna show their employees that, Hey, look, last year, our valuation was 10 million and now it's a hundred million. So we've grown 10 X
 
Adam: (03:19)
.
 
Bharat: (03:19)
So you ought to be working harder and doing good things, you know? So this has become their marketing. You know, you never hear in the media that this company was at 10 million last year, and this year they're at 8 million. When was the last time you heard those news? No, never because they don't get traction. They're not sexy. Yeah. They don't get attention. So you only hear all these news and these headlines about these inflated valuations, because it feeds into the whole venture capital ecosystem.
 
Adam: (03:53)
So I'm a venture capitalist, you know, what should I be looking at before I start investing in a startup that I see, oh, look, this has gotten, you know, this valuation, what else should I be looking at? Besides the valuation.
 
Bharat: (04:06)
You should be looking at what they're going to do with that money. What have they done with that money? Have they grown that company that much? Or, just simply ask, Hey, why did you receive a, 5 million raise at a hundred million valuation? Explain it to me. Why? You know the question why, you'd be surprised is the most important question that people need to ask the how and the who and the, what, you know, you get lost. The why is the real question? And let people answer that question to you. You know, sometimes they'll explain it to you and sometimes they'll just say, Hey, somebody cut me a check for 5 million at a hundred million valuation. I am not going to say no.
 
Adam: (04:49)
Hmm. I mean, not many people would, right?
 
Bharat: (04:52)
Well, sometimes maybe you should, because at each inflection point they will expect you to double the valuation. So the next time you go out and raise capital and you're not able to raise capital at 200 million valuation, you're a loser. So whatever valuation you get this time, make sure you're able to raise, at least double that valuation next time.
 
Adam: (05:17)
So how do you do that?
 
Bharat: (05:20)
The biggest way to do that is to make sure your product is getting traction is growth in the product. They don't venture capitalists don't care about profitability or revenue. Anything like that. What they're really caring about is is your product or whatever you are putting out there as a product or a service is that gaining traction. And one of the metrics to measure how it's gaining traction is revenue. It's one of the metrics it's not the only metric the other metric could be. I don't know, traffic or users or what have you, but you have to just make sure whatever product or whatever you're putting out there is gaining traction. And it's doubling in size every year. If it's not doubling in size every year, you got a problem.
 
Adam: (06:03)
All right. So, you know, your venture capital, your venture capitalist has said, okay, we're going to start. We're going to looking into your start. Investing in this startup. Are there multiple valuations that can happen to see? Hey, like this is where we're at at different times. Is that something that is commonly done?
 
Bharat: (06:20)
Yeah. Most definitely. For example, this Stein, right? You're looking at the back end of this Stein. I'm looking at the front, right? I've got the logo here in the front. Somebody's looking from this side. Somebody's looking from top. Everybody sees a different perspective of the same time, but it is the same Stein. So everybody, you know, depending on the tax person or the accountant or the insurance or the investor or the employee, everybody has a different perspective off the valuation of the same company and they're not wrong. It's their perception. It's their perspective. but it's the same company. So if the company sold raise capital for, you know, raised $5 million at a hundred million valuation, that is one perspective. That is not the only perspective. That is a perspective. There could be another valuation of say 50 million or 20 million or zero. You know, somebody might say the company is worthless. Who's to say they're all incorrect. I would say they all are correct. Depending on the perspective they have.
 
Adam: (07:36)
Do you have any examples of, of, of a time you've seen that happen?
 
Bharat: (07:42)
Not one or two, I mean, many, many examples. I mean, every company that's out there right no...

Connect with Casey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseywoo/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to the Count Me In podcast. I'm your host. Adam Larson in today's guest is really interesting. Casey. Woo. Casey's been a strategic financial leader in Silicon valley for the past two decades, investing in an operating high growth tech and tech enabled companies. He is the CFO of landing, the former head of strategic finance at WeWork and the co-founder of operators Guild, a knowledge sharing community for CFOs and other business operators. And that's just what he is been up to lately today. Casey and I put the microscope on the CFO and how the role has evolved from being the sheriff of cost and budgets to now being a company-wide business partner, focused squarely on the most important metric of all growth. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Casey, thanks so much for joining us today on the Count Me In podcast. we're going to jump right into some, questions we're gonna be focusing in on the CFO. And so to start off, what are some common misconceptions or what is the hook's historical perspective on the role of the CFO?
 
Casey: (01:12)
Yeah, I think I'm probably not going to be novel here in my answer. There is a pretty classic stereotype of a CFO, to borrow a phrase from a friend, you know, there's CFO. No is basically one of them is Dr. No, the, you know, DBER, you know, the nickel and dimer, the no personality, the, yeah, the one that says no to everything in terms of costs and other words like the budget, right? The people think of, you know, my travel and expense reimbursements like that. That's when you get to real stereotypes of just don't you do my team reports, you know? And so, of course at the corporate level, you know, CFOs are, I don't know, misconception, hopefully this is a good conception, but they're the honest broker, right? They're the one who engages with the board as the air quote, pseudo check on leadership, et cetera.
 
Casey: (02:15)
So there's not some misconceptions, some that's true. Absolutely. You have that. A lot of it now is not true. Yes. We manage budgets and money and have that purview. But I think there's also, what's now called CFO grow rather than CFO know. And I do think there's a healthy way to manage in a very responsible way money, but also, and I think the word is invest, right? So they call it strategic CFO. Money is meant to be invested, I guess, saved as well. Right? So when you're, especially in high growth, VPs are not giving you money to sit on it. It's put it to good use and the word is good. Use, not reckless use. and of course you're going to balance a lot of things. So one is just a strategic minded investor mentality of where you want to allocate resources is I think more what's happening. and it's not just about nickel and diamond. there's also, you know, more personalities CFOs than people think it's very, cross-functional. Some are extroverts, most are not, but they can be a very friendly person who empowers ends a business partner rather than a police force.
 
Adam: (03:34)
So when we look at the space of a CFO as an operator, you talked a little bit to me about your operator's Guild. What personal experience do you have and what have you gained in this level of expertise?
 
Casey: (03:45)
Yeah, so, I mean, for those who don't know, the operator's Guild has been going on for eight years. It started as a eight, nine person friend group of operators that we support one another. Now it's about 600. I say this because there's a lot of conversations, there's a lot of learnings. So I'm only going to scratch the surface. A, few things. One, all of businesses, all of startup is, is a bunch of people who decide to get together at eight in the morning to build something, to sell for more than hopefully it costs that's all the businesses or a startup. Let's call it a startup call, whatever you want to call it, just, and notice it's humans, you take away the humans, computer's not going to do anything themselves. And that's number one is business is a game. So when things are crazy or stressful, it's like, no, one's dying here.
 
Casey: (04:39)
This is not real life and death. It's serious. Don't get me wrong. We are very competitive, but there's a lot of natural dysfunction when you toss in money, growth expectations and people, dysfunction is just basic. So that's kind of a learning. and, also work with good people. It just goes back to the business is just a bunch of people. It's not worth it. You can make your money elsewhere. If it's not with good people who respect you, who you respect them, shared values. It's actually very similar to a marriage it's just not intimate, right? But it's the same thing. Shared values. You go on dates that are called interviews. You get divorces, you know, it's because when things are not matching up, another one is don't let stereotypes or misconceptions tell you how you should act in your role, play your strengths, establish yourself as if you're gonna be a strategic CFO, be one that said, maybe you have a, stronger person who compliments you on the expense side.
 
Casey: (05:42)
Who's, much more, you know, doctor knows so to speak, right? That're all really, or, vice versa. You're someone that's extremely conscious. You know, you need to marry that with someone that's a little bit more strategically minded and growth minded. Just,, that's just an example, but, play to your strengths, be who you are and hiring is super important. Probably the key to everything, all things in start are just problems. All we're doing is problem solving every day. If you can put together the right team tools, resources, you can solve any problems. So those are kind of learnings.
 
Adam: (06:19)
Okay. No, that's great. I think that's really nice. and just thinking about the CFO, you talked, when we, my first question, you talked a lot about the misconceptions you knew. I think you laid that out very nicely with the Dr. No, and the Gilbert examples and stuff. but a lot of people tend to under underestimate what the CFO sees because because of this, these misconceptions that can be there. And if the CFO hasn't established himself as like a business partner, it can be very difficult to get a seat at the table. Can you talk a little bit about what the responsibility the CFO has to kind of get there so that they're not underestimated?
 
Casey: (06:54)
I think the first one is before you get married, you should establish that. I would question a company where CFOs not at the table, not, not because of CFOs, you know, all that. It's just because it's, too important of a function just like CRO or CTO. So that's just point number one, if you're fighting to get there. So something's already a little off and you need a question, how they value and what they expect from the function. If you're in the unfortunate seat of, you're not, don't have a seat at the table. I think it's a very clear, I believe in explicit conversation and communication. It's like, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. CEO, this is a function that's critical to the business. I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about the function and for the sake of the business and our stakeholders, it's important that I'm in the room or whoever's leading a function. Would you agree or disagree if they disagree? I would seriously consider finding a place where you can make a bigger impact and, and be valued, because it should be a high impact role.
 
Adam: (08:05)
So you're you have the seat at the table, you know, , you're there with everybody. What does that look like? What does that, CFO's responsibility look like today? As opposed to, you know, the stuff we've already talked about, the misconcept...

Contact Tamara: https://www.linkedin.com/in/innovationtamaraghandour
What is your innovation type: https://www.gotolaunchstreet.com/innovation-training-programs/whats-your-innovation-type/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome to the Count Me In podcast. I'm your host, Adam Larson. And my guest today is Tamara Ghandour, a leader in the field of human-centric innovation and its pivotal role in helping individuals and businesses create breakthrough outcomes. Tomorrow is the president of launch street, the founder of everyday innovator's tribe, the host of her own podcast and the author of the book. Innovation is everybody's business. She is also the creator of the innovation quotient edge, a powerful tool for determining your unique innovation style. This was a really insightful conversation with great tips for unleashing your innovation potential. So here without further ado is my talk with Tamara Ghandour. So Tamara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I'm really excited to have you on, and as we talk about innovation today, I wanted to kind of focus in a little bit. so you talk about how innovation is, how you win against the winds of change. So maybe we can start off by talking a little bit more about that.

Tamara: (01:08)
Yeah, Adam, I think first of all, thank you for having me. I think that's a great place to start because it sets the stage for why innovation is so important and how we can leverage it in ourselves to add value and to contribute and to carbon niche out for ourselves. So here's the thing and I I'm sure we can do a whole podcast on everything that's going on, but let me just kind of sum up the winds of change for us. And the reality of the world that we're in. So, you know, we've got COVID which accelerated everything. So we'll just leave that as the blanket statement, but on top of that, right, we've got AI and technology taking over a lot of the base jobs. A lot of the functions that we have been known to do as humans in our roles, things that we're used to doing, but AI and technology can now do a lot of that.

Tamara: (01:50)
So we've got that happening. We've got web 3.0 in the metaverse coming and kind of how that's going to change everything. I just heard about a project where healthcare going on to the metaverse like, it's incredible, what's happening over there. And then on top of that, right, you've got decentralized finance, you've got the great resignation of where is everybody and why can't I find people to hire or keep people, right? You've got that going on as a wind of change. And then we've got a lot of uncertainty with global politics and just the state of the world. So I say all that, and it sounds like a lot of doom and gloom, but let me focus in on where I think actually it adds to a lot of, opportunity, you know, when times are stable, it breeds efficiency, but it also breeds complacency when times are unstable.

Tamara: (02:35)
Like we're in now, it breeds resilience. We've seen a lot of that from all of us in the past couple of years, but also innovation, a chance to change and to innovate. And you know, the thing about being an innovator that I think is so important right now is when you look at all of that, particularly AI and technology, that's doing the baseline of our job. What that actually means. If you look at it in the right way, is that we have the opportunity to do something that is uniquely human, which is that creative problem solving that empathy, that innovation, that strategic thinking. So we actually have the ability right now, more so than ever with everything going on to actually bring those insights, to bring that innovative mind to the table and be that strategic voice that our clients, our leaders, our teams, our customers, that they all need right now. So the uncertainties crazy on one hand yet on the other hand, the winds of change is what allow us to innovate and shift and change and do things in a way that's, that's different and unique to us.

Adam: (03:37)
Hmm. So, you know, you have this concept that you talk about a, bit as about an everyday innovator. So we're talking about innovation with the winds of change. What is that everyday innovator style. And why does it matter when we're trying to have these, when we're trying to sail the winds of change, if you will, 

Tamara: (03:54)
I like the way you said that I'm going to sail the winds. That's a great way to say that. So every day, and being an everyday innovator is so important, but let me kind of back up as to why oftentimes with innovation, we buy into these myths and I see this all the time. I've been in business for 25 years now. And you know, we think it's Suzie down the hall with a purple streak or the Elon Musk and the Steve jobs and the JK Rowling's and maybe the Oprahs of the world, right? Like they're bestowed with something that we don't have, or we think it's for certain times, like the 3:00 PM brainstorm with the SCED markers and the blank eel pads, right. But every other time, just keep your head down and do your job. Or we think that it is, for certain departments, right?

Tamara: (04:34)
Marketing R and D or certain industries, technologies Silicon valley. But that actually is a sliver of what it means to be an innovator. And what I really come to see in my years of experience is that the best innovation comes from the places where you least expect, right? The everyday innovators who are out there rolling up their sleeves, doing their jobs, the best innovation is small. It's big, but it is inside all of us. And, you know, I used to believe that a little bit of those myths too, but we did a lot of research. We dug into the neuroscience and to change principles. And what we actually found out in our research is that we all have the ability to innovate. So we all have the structures in it, right? Neuroscience shows that it's a whole brain experience that MRIs light up when people create a problem, solve strategic thinking, you know, think differently.

Tamara: (05:21)
and our brains are flexible. We can actually get stronger. It's called neuroplasticity, but the way that all comes together and why it's so important is that Adam is you and me in the roles that we do when we bring innovation to the table and what we have right in front of us, we can get incredible impact. We can create those breakthrough outcomes. So, you know, innovation being siloed, just sabotages it for all of us. When we, as everyday innovators, when we understand that about ourselves, when we unleash that about ourselves, that's where we start to see the value and the difference. And we see it in individuals, leaders, and in teams and how they perform as well. It's why we built the assessment to tell people how they innovate, because we wanted people to say, oh, this is how I innovate. Cause I don't know about you, Adam, but I got pretty tired of hearing people go, you need to innovate.

Tamara: (06:08)
And I was like, how? And then I would try to do it the way you did it, but it didn't work for me because you do it in a way that's different than the way I do it. So understanding your everyday innovator style allows you to tap into what's actually already inside of you. All we're asking you to do is amplify what you're already incredible out. Maybe you're not using it. Maybe you've been trained out of it, but you know what? It's a lot easier for me to tomorrow to innovate in the way I innovate then Adam, to try to do you and vice versa. So that's why it's important.

Adam: (06:38)
That makes sense. Now you've said, you've said that anybody can be an innovator and a lot of times you'll get a book by like a Josh Linkner and yo...

Connect with Kristen:
http://bit.ly/ARDigest
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristendonnellyphd/

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Neha Lagoo Ratnakar, and we are now starting episode 181 of our series. Today's guest is Dr. Kristen Donnelly. Kristen is a celebrated TEDx speaker and founder, and one of The Good Doctors of Abbey Research. Join Kristen and my co-host Adam, as they talk about her work as an empathy educator and how companies and leaders can become more inclusive. So keep listening as a handover with the mic to Adam.
 
Adam: (00:47)
So Kristen, as we get started, I think it would be best for us to define some terms that our listeners may think they understand, but you know, they really may not. Things like diversity, oppression, equality, equity, tolerance, and privilege. These are all terms that we hear in the media a lot. And I think people, they think they understand what they mean, but maybe you can help us by level setting.
 
Kristen: (01:08)
I would love to break that down. So in order to do that though, allow me to kind of set the stage a little bit if you wouldn't mind. Of course. So one of the first things to understand is that the world is set up for some people to be the default definition of human and all around the world, infrastructure, laws, education systems, inventions are all unless, you know, otherwise determined, honestly set up with the default idea that humans will be male. They'll be probably middle to upper middle class. They'll be fully able bodied. Most likely they're gonna be white. They're gonna be cisgendered. Which means that their gender identity matches the sex their body was born with. They're going to be heterosexual and their life goals are going to include things like a mortgage and a partnership and children. Generally, that's the default.
 
Kristen: (02:10)
So when we make working hour laws, we assume that it's a man with a partner at home. When we make cell phones, the only hands that Apple ever tests cell phones on are male hands. When we talk about, you know, what we should pay people. When we talk about how quickly you can pay back your student loans. When we talk about lots of things, whether we realize it or not, we are assuming that the people we are talking about is that category I just defined. So anyway, in which you line up with any of those categories, if you're a male, if you're white, if you're able bodied, if you're middle to upper middle class, if your BMI is socially acceptable, if you're cisgendered, if you're heterosexual, generally, what that means is that you have privilege. Privilege means the system is designed to work for you because you were what they had in mind.
 
Kristen: (03:07)
When they designed the system, there is no shame or judgment or moral imperative that comes with that. There is just, the system is designed to work for you. If you're thinking the, and you're like, that's not true, cuz blah, blah, blah. It's probably cuz you've never seen the system because the system is designed to work for you. So then where oppression comes in is any way in which you don't line up with those systems, the degrees of oppression and privilege vary from category to culture and everything else. The other important piece to understand in this conversation is the phrase, "intersectionality". Intersectionality is a term coined by Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw back in the 1980s, she's a legal scholar. And now she's known often for being one of the four thinkers in critical race theory, which is not what we are teaching children in school.
 
Kristen: (03:59)
I will just simply say that here. It's I have a PhD in sociology and I didn't learn critical race theory. So I promise that fifth graders are learning something a little bit different, but Kimberly Crenshaw came up with intersectionality to acknowledge the fact that while all women are oppressed on some level black women experience oppression at a more significant level than white women do. And essentially what it has come to real mean as social scientists is that we are all a lot of things at once. I am not just a woman. You are not just a whatever you are. I am not just white. I am not just middle class. I'm not just educated. I am all of these things and they come together in very specific ways. It's kind of like the back of a cross stitch. We're all kind of, we're all just a lot of things to make up who we are in the front of the cross stitch.
 
Kristen: (04:49)
Every society has different priorities in terms of which of those threads are privileged and not. I say all the time, like, you know, we, we can add in othering and normal as well for the phrases of privileged and oppressed. If you're normal in your society, you are privileged. If you are othered, you are oppressed in some way, but again, your mileage may vary. Degrees vary here. I have oppression as a woman, for sure. I don't have the same level of oppression in the United States as I would have in Saudi Arabia. But that doesn't mean that I don't have oppression in the US. So the, so there's that. So there's privilege there's intersection, there's othering, there's oppression. All of that. What I like to say is that meaning that everybody is all those things all at once. Actually means that we're all diverse creatures as it is.
 
Kristen: (05:45)
So none of us are one thing which means that you can't create diversity within your organization or your family or your social circle because everyone is already diverse. What you need to do instead is create inclusivity. And inclusivity is the decision to let everybody show up on their own terms and not determine the shorthand for who they are. And we get that shorthand through using tolerance and tolerance is simply saying you are alive because I cannot kill you. That's it. Tolerance is drilling everybody down to the easiest, common denominator that we can see when we look at them and putting them in categories that are easy for us to interact with it denies people, their personhood and their complications. It allows us to say, well, I can't ever know that person, cuz they voted for someone different than me. I can't ever know that person because they're gay. I can't ever know that person because they're evil. And instead if we eliminate tolerance, which is one of my life missions and we understand that everybody's already a diverse person in front of you, you're diverse, I'm diverse. We're all diverse heyo. What we're actually trying is create inclusivity. Then we can have the hard conversations about how to do that. But let's eliminate the myth that tolerance gets us anywhere.
 
Adam: (07:12)
Wow. So you've covered a lot of things and I wanted to kind of circle back to where you started, where you were talking about the ideal human, right? Mm-hmm, so if you don't meet that criteria, you become an other.
 
Kristen: (07:24)
In some way.
 
Adam: (07:25)
In some way, right? So a lot of times when we get separated and we try to find others who have been othered, who are othered like us and we come together because we wanna feel comfortable with somebody who's been othered as well.
 
Kristen: (07:37)
Absolutely.
 
Adam: (07:38)
But is that so bad that we do that?
 
Kristen: (07:41)
No, if that's, if it's the end goal and you stay in that group, maybe.
 
Adam: (07:46)
Okay.
 
Kristen: (07:46)
Or if you all pretend that the only thing you are is that thing you got othered for. Then I think it gets limiting. That is a weird ...

Contact Jim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimrafferty1/

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha: (00:05)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Neha Lagoo Ratnakar bringing you episode 180 of our series. In today's episode, our guest is Jim Rafferty. Jim is a marketing and communications consultant and the author of Leader by Accident. My cohost Mitch Roshong, and Jim Rafferty talk about how cultivating a gratitude mindset helps transform leaders and organizations in extraordinary ways. To hear more let's head over to the conversation now.
 
 Mitch: (00:50)
 So Jim, in your opinion, what are the most common characteristics of, or needed attributes for effective leadership in today's business environment?
 
 Jim: (01:00)
 You know, I think the first word that would jump to mind would be empathy and that's always a quality we've needed in leaders to be sure. I think we need it more than ever before here over these last couple of years as we've all really had to adapt on the fly to a lot of changing circumstances. And all of a sudden your concern as a business leader is, you know, not only what your employee, your team member is doing in the office, but now whether they're also trying to, you know, homeschool their kids and take care of the dogs or an aging parent or whatever, as they're trying to work from home and get stuff done. And I think that's called for an enormous amount of flexibility and empathy on the part of leaders in the business environment.
 
 Mitch: (01:43)
 And now oftentimes leaders are looked to for direction, right? They are providing others with information that they will ultimately need to adapt to, but this flexibility and adaptability, agility really is starting to shift into the role of the leader. So, again, in your words, how, or why do leaders need to be even more adaptable today?
 
 Jim: (02:10)
 I think the, the sort of 10,000 foot view of leadership and, you know, this predates the pandemic, but maybe the pandemic sort of accelerated it is, you know, however many years ago we wanna look, the leader was the boss and he, or she told you what to, and you did it. And if you didn't, then there were consequences. And I think, you know, in a lot of cases, hopefully it's become more of a two-way thing. So, you know, the leader is not only talking, but listening and, you know, involving and engaging the team members and getting that feedback that ultimately is gonna make it a better place. And it's become less of a, my way. I hope it's become less of a, my way or the highway sort of situation because, you know, the saying that's the same, you know, then or now I think is, you know, people join companies and they quit bosses and they will quit bosses.
 
 Jim: (03:02)
 We've seen this in the great resignation here, you know, dating back to, I guess, you know, November we're really the biggest numbers, but, you know, when they feel like they're not being listened to when they feel like they're not being engaged and, you know, in this whole remote work setting, that's become even a bigger challenge because we, we lose is that face to face thing, we lose the nonverbals that we would get if somebody's sitting across a desk from us and it just, it takes a little extra work and to reach a little deeper into the empathy bucket, so to speak if you're a leader.
 
 Mitch: (03:33)
 And, you know, once a leader adapts, right. And, you said it, empathy is something that has always been important, but it's more of that adapting and their style, their behaviors, everything you just mentioned. I think one of the most important traits that we discussed previously that I would really like to hear your perspective on a little bit deeper is the idea of gratitude. So from the leader's perspective, again, it's more often, I believe historically, it's the employees that are grateful and express gratitude for the opportunities that are given to them. But from the leader's perspective, what does gratitude really look like?
 
 Jim: (04:15)
 Yeah, my book, Leader by Accident, I would say has three main themes. And one is about, you know, challenging yourself and getting out of your comfort zone. Two is about the, the language that we use as leaders and, you know, the impact that that can have on organizational culture. And three is this sense of gratitude that you bring up. And that was a recurring theme in the messages I gave to the young men of our boy scout troop in my five years as a scout master, because, you know, it's hard and we tend as a society to default to the other way, right? If you scroll through your social media feed or you look at anything political, right, it's this relentless stream of negativity that just seems to keep getting worse and worse and worse. So I think, you know, even setting leadership aside just as human beings is so important because it just, it just changes the way we go through our days and it takes a little work.
 
 Mitch: (05:07)
 And now, you know, it's a, it's a quality that I think is most valuable when, you know, you mentioned everybody kind of buys into it, right? So in, in terms of gratitude, how do you get people to stop with that negativity, take the step back. How do you cascade this thought process or this feeling, this emotion down throughout the entire organization? So it's much more of a positive culture and workplace for everybody.
 
 Jim: (05:38)
 I think being a leader in that sense is a lot like being a parent in that we can, and we do say things and teach lessons and tell people things and hope that the, you know, it will sink in and all but much more than that. They're going to observe what we do and how we comport ourselves and the way that we respond to things. And so if we want to display a sense of gratitude, you know, if we want our employees to display a sense of gratitude, we have to start by doing that ourselves. And a lot of that I think comes in the sense in the way that we respond to things. I mean, how do we respond when things go wrong? Are we the unflappable leader, or do we fly into immediately, you know, end of the world panic mode. And, you know, obviously the former is the preferred choice. If you're leading a team.
 
 Mitch: (06:25)
 And now I, I kind of, you know, flip flopped some of the conversation that we were gonna have here. But now that we understand how things kind of get across the organization, we have that buy-in once there is this positive culture and ideally the leader is setting the tone. What are the benefits of a workplace that embraces gratitude? What are, what, what does that look like from a team perspective?
 
 Jim: (06:52)
 I think that if we're cultivating a positive environment and gratitude certainly is a big part of that, you know, and sort of what we've already talked about a little bit in terms of, you know, we've adapted as leaders and we are engaging our team members and we're being positive, and they know that a ton of bricks isn't gonna come down on their head with every little mistake they made. In other words, that they are trusted, right. Then what happens typically is they start to do the things we say we want our employees to do, right. They start to think outside the box and they start to, you know, quote unquote, act like owners of the company and think about the bigger picture beyond their own little checklist of things they do. And they stop running to you, the manager or the leader to cross every T and dot every I, because you know, what they're doing is covering their own behind.
 
...

Contact Sammy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sammycourtright/

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha: (00:05)
 Welcome back for episode 179 of our podcast series. This is your host Neha Lagoo Ratnakar, and you're once again listening to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. Today, you're going to hear from Sammy Courtwright, the co-founder of Ten Spot. Ten Spot is a workforce engagement platform helping companies enhance their work from home capabilities. Sammy joins us to talk about how technology has impacted today's work environment, what it means for our work life balance and what the future of the workforce looks like based on current trends. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now. 
 
 Mitch: (00:56)
 So right before we started recording here, we were talking a little bit about how things have changed over the last couple years, and to kick off our conversation. I'd like to first ask how has technology impacted work being done at work? 
 
 Sammy: (01:10)
 Yeah, Mitch, I mean, what a change we were faced two years ago, right? Where suddenly we were thrown into remote or distributed work and technology, thank goodness was able to make that transition moderately seamless. Right? Of course there was always that idea of having to figure out which technology we're going to use. Does it work? Does everyone know how to use it? Is it effective? Now we have to buy more licenses, but it's definitely made this working from home or hybrid work significantly more streamlined collaborative, but it's also made it really constant, right? I feel like you're always on, which is a good thing and a bad thing for some people. I think at the beginning of the pandemic, when things were a little bit slower Netflix and all of those other subscription services, weren't pumping out the content as quickly. You might just check another email. 
 
 Sammy: (02:03)
 You might respond or start working on a project. And while that was great, I think now we've realized that we went too far, perhaps in one direction of always being on. And I think now people are being a little bit more clear or understanding of creating better boundaries with technology. So when am I on, how do I set myself up for success? Am I balancing that a little bit more? So technology definitely impacted the work that we're able to do from anywhere, not necessarily from your home. But it comes with some pros and cons. 
 
 Mitch: (02:38)
 Absolutely. And I think anybody listening can relate. So, you know, you mentioned balance here and I want to get into that work life balance because it is so easy to work remotely and through the different tablets and laptops and phones and everything, that's at our fingertips. So what are some of the things that people can do to really just shut off both, you know, work and technology so that we can really, you know, make strides towards this work life balance? 
 
 Sammy: (03:06)
 Sure. So I have found that I'm paying far more attention to my screen time. At least Apple has this function. I'm uncertain about other models, where it tells you how much time you're spending on your screen. Similarly, apps like Google have taken a further kind of dive into the calendar settings and has allowed you to take a look at your calendar and understand when there is focus time when there is shutoff time, when there is even on my phone, I've set up sleep time where it knows that I'm gonna be winding down to go to sleep at a certain hour. So it starts going into, to kind of shut off mode. I don't really access social media at that time, or it lets me know that, Hey, you're in sleep mode. You might not wanna be checking, you know, Instagram right before you go to bed. 
 
 Sammy: (03:49)
 It makes you a lot more aware. I don't think that I even really had that visibility or was aware of how much time I was spending either on my computer tablet or phone, but now that Apple, at least, and many other applications are really starting to focus on how much time you are spending using technology. I think it's helped me create a better boundary of switching off or not always being on. I really think awareness is kind of the key to this. So for people that are asking that like Hey I'm uncertain, you know, what to do to get started. I always recommend take a look at your calendar, take a look at your habits and your day, and just start jotting down things that you're doing. How much time are you spending on that specific project? How much time are you spending in front of the computer? 
 
 Sammy: (04:33)
 Are you getting up to get that glass of water or do you wait until, you know, that specific task is done before you reward yourself with getting up and, you know, getting that glass of water, those things make a really big difference. And they even say those 10 to 15 seconds, 30 seconds breaks that you can take to, you know, get up and go refresh your water or whatever it might be. Grab a cup of coffee, really recharges your brain and allows you to be more creative. So I think for those that are looking, you know, to maybe just get started and want to shut off or create more boundaries, start documenting what you're doing and how you're using technology and start creating a little bit more limits. What do you wanna do with that time instead? Is it, you wanna read a book? You wanna meditate more, you wanna go for a walk, you want to spend more time with your kids. You wanna play with your dog. I think for those moments, and you can even put them into your calendar, block out those moments have been really effective and helps people at least shut off, from both work and technology to kind of maintain that healthier work life balance. 
 
 Mitch: (05:37)
 You know, I use focus time throughout the week, you know, on my calendar and other thing, turning off the phone and sleep mode, all that stuff. The whoop band that I have tells me when to go to bed. So I know all right, it's time to shut everything else down, leave it alone. So there is, there are so many options available to us. Really you just have to seek them out and take advantage of 'em. I think, because it's so helpful, at least in my personal experiences, you know, but that's on the personal side of things. And obviously everybody has gotten relatively accustomed to a different kind of work life balance. And as they adjust to everything you are mentioning, you know, they are seeking new things I think from work, right. And we're seeing a lot happening in the workforce today. So my next question for you is kind of taking it back to business a little bit, if you will. And from the employer's perspective, with the idea of work life balance in mind, how should these employers, how should these businesses really work to keep employees engaged and retain them? You know, like I said, with everything else going on today. 
 
 Sammy: (06:45)
 Yeah. I always think the first step is to acknowledge it. I think employers are now realizing that employees are not just employees anymore, that they're people with lives outside of work. And in reality, I know that this has always been the case, but anyone who has been on a zoom call in the last like 18 months now, we all know a lot more about their dogs, their cats, their kids, their partners, their parents. We know so much more about our colleagues and coworkers lives. I really think this blurred line of work and life encouraged employees to expect their companies to consider and acknowledge their whole selves and all of these roles that we play outside of work, whether that's parentho...