The coronavirus has caught everyone’s attention, and not in a good way. Most of what you read out there largely falls somewhere between paranoia and panic and — given the reliability of the “news” we see in our social feeds — that’s not good for anybody. Jennifer Elder of the Business Learning Institute has compiled a list of questions that business leaders can use to help their organizations prepare for the potential impact of the coronavirus. And now is the best time to do it because things ar...
Mar 16, 2020•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast When you’re talking about life in an exponential age, there are few skills that are as important as anticipation — the ability to spot future trends early, before they become truly disruptive, and take advantage of the opportunities they offer. One person who truly understands the importance of anticipation is our guest today, Rita McGrath. Rita is a longtime professor at Columbia Business School and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review. She’s considered one of the world’s top expert...
Mar 02, 2020•37 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast Bots are the name of the game this week. They are all the rage, and they’re setting their sights on the accounting and finance world. No one knows that more than our guest this week. Jody Padar built her “Radical CPA” brand as chief executive officer of New Vision CPA Group near Chicago. But then, in January she was named vice president of strategy for Botkeeper. We ask Jody about the potential of bots to transform this profession. As a future-focused accounting and finance professional, this is...
Feb 24, 2020•30 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast When we had a whole show highlighting blockchain last year, the hype around it was sky-high. It was supposed to transform our profession and, in fact, many professions. It seemed like there was no problem that couldn’t potentially be solved through the use of blockchain technology. Now, things have cooled off a bit, but people in our profession are still very interested in how blockchain might transform what we do. Keith Nichols, General Manager for small to mid-size firms with Thomson Reuters, ...
Feb 17, 2020•31 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast We spend a lot of time talking about exponential technologies and the disruptive impact they’re having on our world — but today’s guest turns the tables on the mindset and focuses, instead, on the importance of exponential thinking . Jeffrey Rogers is the Principal Facilitator at Singularity University , which is a global learning and innovation community that uses exponential technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges. To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blion...
Feb 10, 2020•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we’re talking about innovation in CPA firms — and, no, this isn’t the punchline to a knock-knock joke. It’s happening, believe it or not, and on a pretty serious scale. Joining us to about it is none other than Jonathan Kraftchick. Jonathan is the partner of assurance services in the Raleigh office of Cherry Bekaert, where he is known (informally) as the firm’s Innovation Partner and heads up the firm’s Innovation Team. Jonathan has some great insights into what innovation...
Feb 04, 2020•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast We spent last week talking about federal tax issues that you might need to know about as we head into this year’s Busy Season. This week, we’re going to do the same thing — but on the state tax side of the ledger. So we sit down with Peter Franchot, comptroller for the state of Maryland. We also asked some of our MACPA members what questions they have for the comptroller, and we got a ton of responses. We were able to ask a few in this episode, but we hope to share answers to even more of your q...
Jan 20, 2020•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Settle in and relax, folks, because this might be your last chance to chill until April. Yeah, tax season is here. And yeah, you’re probably going to be busy — but today’s episode just might help. Our guest is Cari Weston, director of tax practice and ethics for the American Institute of CPAs. She down with our host, Bill Sheridan, at the 2019 Digital CPA Conference to talk about the issues that will be impacting tax pros in 2020. This year, for a change, those issues go well beyond the Tax Cuts...
Jan 13, 2020•32 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast Given the latest research within the profession — see our recent conversation with Lexy Kessler for details on all of that — there’s one thing that most accounting and finance professionals are thinking about: talent. How to find talent, how to keep it, and how to figure out what the best talent wants in the first place. This last bit is really important, too, because what younger generations want is often different from what the older generations wanted. To learn more about this generatio...
Jan 06, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode releases on the cusp of a new year — so, if you’re reading this in 2019, we want to wish you a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2020. Here’s to you and yours. Of course, with the new year comes New Year’s resolutions, and there’s one resolution that all accounting and finance professionals (and, really, most people) can benefit from: becoming a better delegator. So we sit down with Emily Morgan, the mastermind behind a group called Delegate Solutions, which offers premium-le...
Dec 30, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Client Accounting Services (CAS) are the services that CPAs provide because clients can’t do them, don’t want to do them, or just aren’t good at doing them. It’s that full-menu offering of taking over many of a client’s routine internal accounting chores. The popularity of these services is growing, too — to the extent that a lot of people in the accounting and finance profession consider CAS to be a new line of business, something they need to start exploring to keep up with the competiti...
Dec 23, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode puts the P in CPA — because we’re talking about public practice! What is going on with CPA firms these days, anyway? Quite a bit, as it turns out. The world is changing, and with every change that the world experiences these days, the folks who work at CPA firms seem to get a double dose of it. They have to figure out how to embrace these changes and disruptions inside their own firms, but at the same time, they have to help their clients figure out what to do about all of this c...
Dec 16, 2019•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we’re asking an important question that every industry is going to have to ask sooner or later: What does future-focused leadership look like? Our guest, Rachel Druckenmiller, is on a mission to humanize the workplace by igniting intentional leadership. She has made a name for herself nationally in the fields of workplace wellness and culture. In 2019, she was recognized as a 40 Under 40 Game Changer by Workforce Magazine, and in 2018, Employ Humanity named her one of “7 Wellness Leaders M...
Dec 09, 2019•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast So you know Simon Sinek? Best-selling author, leadership expert, the people-don’t-buy-what-you-do-they-buy-why-you-do-it guy? Well, he has a new book titled The Infinite Game and our host, Bill Sheridan, has become a bit obsessed with this notion of playing the Infinite Game, of adopting an infinite mindset. So we sat down with Stephen Shedletzky, chief of staff with Simon Sinek’s team at Start With Why. He supports leaders in creating environments where their people feel inspired to go to work,...
Dec 02, 2019•31 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast Back in episode 66 , we spoke with Matt Loeb about digital transformation, and he brought up a great point — just because you’re enacting some digital solutions doesn’t make you a digital organization. There’s a difference between doing digital and being digital, which is about culture and mindset more than anything else. Jeanne Ross is a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Research Center for Information Systems Research and co-author of a new book titled Designed for Digital: Ho...
Nov 25, 2019•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode focuses on something a little different. Not the technology that’s going to prepare us for the future, not the hard trends that will affect change in the future, and not why we should stop panicking about AI putting all auditors out of work. Today, we’re talking about joy. Because our guest is Richard Sheridan, co-founder and CEO of Menlo Innovations (and of no relation to our host Bill Sheridan), has written two books on the topic: Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love...
Nov 18, 2019•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Riddle me this, Batman: What do you get when you cross exponential advances in technology with an unrelenting regulatory environment? The answer is no joke: what you get, oftentimes, is one big headache. These “hard trends” or “future facts” that futurist Daniel Burrus talks about — the things that we know will happen, with absolute certainty — they’re hard enough to come to grips with individually. But when they cross borders and join forces... well, that’s when our lives really start to get co...
Nov 11, 2019•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Halloween is over. Autumn is kicking into full gear. And you know what that means — it’s time to talk about audits! Because the future of audit is... uncertain, to say the least. Luckily, we had an opportunity to talk to Mark Miklosovic, the Customer Proposition Strategy Lead for tax professionals at Thomson Reuters, who spends much of his time thinking very critically about the future of this profession. We talk about where audit has been, where it is now, where it is going — and most imp...
Nov 04, 2019•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pretty much every survey under the sun identifies recruitment and retention as one of the top five issues facing accounting and finance organizations today. Everyone is struggling with this and nobody seems to know how to solve it. There are a lot of suggestions being put forward throughout the profession — communicate, be a role model, make your expectations clear, offer a safe working environment, provide a clear career path, build leaders — and that’s all great advice. Yet, no matter how many...
Oct 28, 2019•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we’re going to talk about something that most accounting and finance professionals probably never give a second thought — writing. Writing is one of those skills that we all take for granted. We all do it in some way, shape, or form every day, so we all assume we’re awesome at it. Maybe even better at it than some of our peers? This is a misconception that happens all the time, in different areas of our life. We can’t all be better than mostly everyone else at most things, but we’ll learn ...
Oct 14, 2019•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pascal Finette is co-founder of be radical , an organization that teaches leaders how to create new business models for success, positively embrace disruption, and prepare their people to be future-forward and future-ready. He is also chair for Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation at Singularity University , which is a global learning and innovation community that uses exponential technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges. He previously held leadership positions at Google, Mozilla, a...
Oct 07, 2019•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summer’s over, October’s here, and things are changing. But that’s the state of our world today, isn’t it? And not just when it comes to the weather. Change is the new normal, and that can be an uncomfortable thing, especially for CPAs. But for those who are ready to embrace it — to adapt a more nimble and flexible mindset — there are a lot of opportunities just waiting to be taken advantage of. The question is, then, how do we do that? How do we start embracing flexibility and fluid...
Sep 30, 2019•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’re jumping back on the culture train today. As you can probably tell, we’re big believers in getting your culture right. We’ve had conversations on the topic with Tom Peters , Karl Alrichs , Jamie Notter , Richard Silberstein , and David Barrett — and that’s because it’s a REALLY important conversation to be having! Really, there might not be a bigger or more important differentiator in business today than your culture. If you get it right, you’re going to have a leg up in recruitment a...
Sep 23, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about Color Accounting — and if you’re not familiar with Color Accounting yet, you need to be! So, we invited Peter Frampton, co-founder of Color Accounting, onto the show to teach us all about what Color Accounting is and why it’s so important to the future of our profession. To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit blionline.org/blog . Resources: ColorAccounting.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/peterframpton How Color Accounting works: https://youtu.be/QeoC...
Sep 16, 2019•30 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast Today we’re going to talk about something you probably didn’t expect from this show: Cannabis. But legalization for both medical and recreational cannabis products is growing at the state level. At this point, it seems like a hard trend. So it’s high time we talked about this stuff (pun intended) if we want to future-proof this profession. To help us come to a joint understanding, if you will, about how we can best serve our clients in this area, we are joined by Emily Burns, who pro...
Sep 09, 2019•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve been talking about the cloud for so long now that it’s easy to assume that everyone already has it figured out – but that’s the wrong assumption to make with our profession. There are exceptions, of course. There are some accounting and finance pros out there who take pride in getting ahead of new technologies early. But a sizeable part of the profession hasn’t made that leap yet. So Blake Oliver, co-host of the Cloud Accounting Podcast, joins us to assess where we’re at in the profession ...
Sep 02, 2019•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you transform your organization into a truly digital organization? It’s not as simple as it sounds. You can’t just about employ some digital technologies and think that you’ve made it. Doing digital and being digital are not the same things. Not even close. So, we’re joined by Matt Loeb, principal of Optimal Performance Seekers and acting CEO of SECURE, who is simply one of the deepest thinkers about what it means to be digital in an increasingly digital world. Quite frankly, too many peo...
Aug 26, 2019•38 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast To know where you’re going, you have to have an understanding of – and an appreciation for – where you’ve been. Publisher and activist Marcus Garvey said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” And Michael Crichton, the bestselling author of Jurassic Park and Westworld, said, “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” Why are our two favorite quotes about histo...
Aug 19, 2019•54 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast We spend a lot of time on this show talking about future trends and technologies — things like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and automation – and, more importantly, what those things mean for the future of our profession. But there are many other hard trends — a.k.a. future facts, a.k.a. things that we know are going to happen – that will have a huge impact on what we do. The topics aren’t always as sexy, sure, but they’re equally impactful, and if we want to get serious about becoming fu...
Aug 12, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest today is Neil Irwin, who is the senior economic correspondent at the New York Times and the best-selling author of The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, about the global financial crisis and its aftermath. And Irwin recently wrote a new book titled How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers . It’s a fascinating and important book, given the changing and complex world we live in. To learn more, ...
Aug 05, 2019•27 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast 
