Improv is no Joke – Episode 76 – Dr. David Brobeck

David: [00:00:00] I tell students if I can’t show you how whatever the concept is doesn’t fit your job, call me out on it because I believe I should do that. I was a theory-based superintendent, but I converted it all to practical language people can understand.

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Intro: [00:00:23] Welcome to Improv is no Joke podcast, where it’s all about becoming a more effective communicator by embracing the principles of improvisation. Your host is Peter Margaritis, the man whose name is pronounced like a cocktail but spelled like an inflammation. Peter is the self-proclaimed chief edutainment officer of my business, the Accidental Accountant. Peter’s goal is to provide you with thought-provoking interviews with business leaders so you can become an effective improviser, which will lead to building stronger relationships with clients, customers, colleagues, and even your family. So let’s start to show.

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Peter: [00:01:06] Welcome to episode 76 and today my guest is Dr. David Brobeck, The problem-solving professor, who is a professional speaker and a professor of graduate education at Walsh University in North Canton Ohio. Raised in the shadows of western Pennsylvania steel mills. He holds a bachelor’s from California Lutheran University and a master’s and a doctorate from Kent State University. His current academic focus is researching various means to enhancing teaching and learning based on neuroscience. Regardless of what endeavor, David believes learning should be fun. Let’s get to the interview and learn about the tips and techniques on how we can make learning fun in order to increase the audience member retention rate. However quick note: during the interview David refers to the QRST method, and this stands for question, reflect, share, and then team. Share with the group. So with that being said let’s get to the interview. David thank you so very much for being a guest on my podcast. I am so excited and looking forward to our conversation today.

David: [00:02:24] Peter it’s my honor to be here.

Peter: [00:02:25] David we go back as members of the National Speakers Association. But I remember the first time I saw you I was in Philadelphia at the National Speakers Association annual convention and I said in your breakout session on whole brain teaching techniques, which really opened my eyes as big aha moment about there’s there’s a lot more to the classroom than just lecturing. And I always kind of had a feel for that in teaching the at Ohio Dominican. But you did some things in a very different way. And if I remember correctly you have this belief as I do that learning should be fun.

David: [00:03:07] Well I have a slide in every presentation I do that if you’re not a fun person you may hate the session. Then I explain to them you might want to fake it because the brain can’t tell the difference with fake fun and real fun. But we do know people learn more when there is humor involved, and has to do a hormone release and some other things in the brain function.

Peter: [00:03:27] So you’re a Professor at Walsh University. How did you find this as your passion as far as your research?

David: [00:03:34] I started on early when I shifted from K-12. I was a 35 year veteran of teaching English for 17 years. I was a middle school principal. I was school superintendent in Ohio and then I was hired by Walsh to teach graduate school. One of my grad students I used to challenge them in their capstone course to come up with something that I might not know about and surprised me. And she did a presentation some thing called whole brain teaching. I went on and saw a couple of videos and I was fascinated because it reminded me of two areas: coaching, where coaches often will use different callback and chant techniques, and sometimes in church, and churches will often use something where there is an audience response, whether it’s say amen or some sort of Liturgy where things are repeated. So the school sent me to Louisiana college for the National Brain conference that summer. I met Chris Biffle, the California professor who invented these techniques. And then we started to apply it to the classes we’re teaching because it works. Which opened up the door for me to then continue to study the brain and learning.

Peter: [00:04:44] Well I want to say that I’ve become more fascinated with with the brain and you were in the session when John Mogador came to our NSA chapter meeting and was talking about the brain and how it functions. Obviously you’re well versed in this was my first indoctrination into it really from an audience perspective, and understanding how that audience brains work. And I’ve become so so fascinated with this. Yeah I’ve I’ve read the book Brain Rules by John Medina and in part I want to interview you to learn more about how an audience member — because any time we present anything, we’re transferring knowledge, we’re transferring information. And in my world of accounting, data is pretty boring. And if they’re not looking at the slides, they’re reading the reading the email. But we just– we’re not engaging that audience members brain and helping with that level of retention. So I’m I’m looking forward to your thoughts, your techniques that you use to help increase retention in an audience member, as well as keeping them engaged.

David: [00:05:52] There are some consistencies about the human brain that don’t change from a human being to human being. We’re hardwired for certain things. Every baby is born knowing how to nurse. The police catch people because human beings have patterns of behavior that caused them to do certain things. All of that being said, we also have a lot of studies… I happen to study psychometric … genetics. Many people know Meyers-Briggs or the DiSC system and even the Native Americans used to look at the human brain as having four types of thinking preferences. So when we understand that and we’re talking to an audience, they may be looking at their phone which is a mistake for one reason because the human brain cannot multitask. We we hear that they are all based they’re really good at multitasking. Well they tend to be better at task shifting not multitasking. And the best example of that is if somebody is on the telephone talking when they’re driving and suddenly an ice storm comes up in the cars swearer swerves they stop talking because now the brain is out of automatic mode and is having to concentrate on being able to control the car. So we have certain automatic things and that’s why people think well yeah I can do two things at once. Well you can but you can only do it in certain circumstances. So when you talk about an audience, and you’re trying to engage them, then we need to understand there are lots of different types of thinkers out there – and I’m not talking about learning preference, I’m talking about thinking preferences. So how can I tap into that so that I can make sure that I can touch each audience member? And that becomes then the challenge of the presenter.

Peter: [00:07:29] So how do you how would you assess an audience? Me when I went for a speaking engagement to try to get an idea who who’s in my audience. The composition of it. And most of my most of my presentations are to accountant CPA. So I have an idea. So how should I be structuring that conversation? I like to call it a conversation versus a presentation in order to increase that level of retention for that type of audience member.

David: [00:07:57] Well first of all we know that the greatest professional speakers out there – the Zig Ziegler’s and the Lou Heckler’s – and these people that are fabulous storytellers. Ragini Robertson comes to mind. They all use humor and ways to engage the brain and people remember story better than they remember facts – but most of us don’t have that skill set. So what we need to do is remember that we have to have a structure there, because people expect that. They want to know where we’re going and there has to be a way of doing that. If we present facts — When I was at the session that I did at NSA in Philadelphia in 2013, I did hint at a sheet that said brain facts. I did not list the sources on it but I just listed the facts and I had one person say “Well this has no value. There are no sources.” Well I know that person has an interest in analytical information that I needed to go back and provide data. I got his email address I went back and I gave the source for every site on the handout and I sent it to him. We know people in there liked to engage with each other. We know there are some people who are not. So how can we provide an avenue that we can stop at some point in time and let people talk to each other? The human in the classroom for example we know that allowing students or in this case an audience to talk to each other is one of the ways the human brain processes information, sorts it, and determines that it’s meaningful, because when we switch the speaking function Suddenly we’re at a different level. And then finally the big picture you have people in there that are highly conceptual and want to have a vision. And somehow you touch on that as well. So if we’re we’re organized, we’re making sure we support our our information with back up. If we give people a chance to interact and we give them a big picture, we pretty much touched on the major components of each person in the room.

Peter: [00:09:51] Wow ok I get that. But but with what… Why do something– you brought up laughter. And I tell the story of how I got into the tax side of accounting vs the auditing side of accounting, and it came in my graduate program because my tax professor made me laugh. My tax professor tried to make tax accounting fun, while my auditing professor was just boring us to death with all these facts and it wasn’t fun. What is it in the brain that when we laugh or some some emotionally charged event – what is it that happens at that point in time?

David: [00:10:28] Well if you were to interlock your fingers to the inside and open it up and wiggle them that’s how I demonstrate – this is the inner workings of the limbic system of the brain. The limbic system is an emotional area. There’s a professor at Harvard University, Amy Cuddy, who has more of the most watched ever TED talks. She talks about endorphins and cortisol being released from her brain. Laughter releases endorphins. I had a student just quote the movie Legally Blonde because the attorney says she couldn’t have killed him because she exercises and exercise releases endorphins and happy people don’t do bad crimes. Same concept. When you laugh you’re releasing these endorphins. We learn more when we have endorphins being released in our brain. Conversely, cortisol is released when we need to protect ourselves. So a stressful classroom that you fear failure or you fear the professor or it’s boring you to death can actually cause the brain to start to protect itself, and then you don’t learn as much. So it’s the limbic system that causes the reason that laughter you liked it better, and also why you remembered more.

Peter: [00:11:34] OK so cortisol. It’s a defense mechanism.

David: [00:11:39] Cortisol is a hormone.

Peter: [00:11:41] Yeah but it makes the–

David: [00:11:43] Yeah so, in the Cuddy study, what she did. They they took the body language and they compared the Wonder Woman pose with hands on hips.

Peter: [00:11:52] Right.

David: [00:11:52] Or the victory pose with hands over head and signaling a touchdown. Then they had people cross their arms cross your legs and sit and for two minutes and they were observed then they actually gave out energy that was not as positive. People who were crossing your arms are not viewed as quality candidates as those who stood in power poses. Which all goes back to you can control the release of hormones in your body, which is one of the reasons I go back to if you don’t think it’s funny, pretend, because the brain doesn’t know the difference between fake laughter and fake humor and fake enjoyment and real enjoyment. A la nightmares and happy dreams.

Peter: [00:12:29] OK. So if obviously if I if I want the class to be more engaged, I want them to to release the.

David: [00:12:38] Endorphins.

Peter: [00:12:38] Thank you. Endorphins. Does dopamine come into this and all?

David: [00:12:44] Yeah it’s the same type of thing. It’s a positive hormone. I mean they had a study that they did – they showed people scary faces and then they had them sniff oxytocin, which simulates social interaction and support from other people, relational. And they found that the scary faces didn’t frighten them any more. Once the human brain had a chance to socialize another brain. Our brains are highly social. Human beings like to socialize. If it’s it sometimes when you know you sense something from a family member. Women seem to know what each other is thinking. College roommates will often start to menstruate at the same time – I have four daughters. That is a common thing at my house. If they’re all living together all their bodies will go on the same cycle. That’s all brain based. And I don’t know why that was done that way or how or what, but it is factual that those things happen.

Peter: [00:13:42] So we have the ability in the classroom to try to enhance some of that hormone release in our audience. If we know the positive effect it will have. And I would assume that if we if we find ourselves going down the path that we can see that the defensiveness of the protectiveness that we need to change our delivery method in order to help increase learning. Is that a fair statement?

David: [00:14:11] Yeah. Again you just see the greatest speakers out there do all these things. They have emotional connection to the audience. They they have a way of you know maybe the audience turns and talks to each other. You mentioned John Mollet. I felt validated he was there because what I do is different and a lot of people don’t do that and trying to convince a classroom teacher or a college professor to try these things is much more difficult actually than trying to convince a professional speaker to do it. But it does work. I’ve given the example if you ever listened to Martin Luther King Jr. speak – he was very much a whole brain speaker. He would say things and the audience would start repeating with him. He’d have them repeat things he said. Some people say well that was the preaching style. Well it might be but it’s still a speaking style that is effective at getting people to remember what you’re talking about.

Peter: [00:15:05] So that also goes with repetition as well. And I’m trying to remember – I mean 2013 was a long time ago but I was in your class and I know… my colleague Jennifer Elder really took a lot of what you did and was applied it in the classroom. I tried some things and I’m trying to remember what were some of those techniques that you. You taught that day.

David: [00:15:28] Well one of the things that that I do is for example we use gestures. I’ll make a gesture that seems to fit. When I teach a legal and ethical class when I teach the 14th Amendment, which is due process, I take a gesture which I touch my heart and I say life I raise my hands as I’m holding a torch to say liberty. Then I put my hands together and I have my thumbs chase each other and pursuit of happiness. I have the students repeat about three times and I pretty much know at the end of the semester they’ll all remember exactly what that is. And the symbol of the gesture I use for the 14th Amendment is my hands going back and forth as if to tip the scales. That’s one of the things we did. I also I probably don’t remember exactly but I probably taught something that I called QRST. Where I asked a question, I asked the audience to think about the question for a certain amount of time – say anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds, 30 seconds is long. I then asked them to share information with one other member. I told my Exactly how much time I would give them to talk, which maybe is 30 seconds. I then used a neurotransmitter break called an off switch where I say a switch and then the audience – you can ham it up by reaching for the sky like you’re pulling down a big switch and you say switch. Then the other person has the exact same amount of time, and we process up with that. Now the purpose behind that from the brain and learning point, and I did this actually I know what you do. I had a roomful of government finance workers at their national convention a couple of years ago. But the idea is by giving a timeframe, we’re going to touch everybody. First of all reflective learners need time to think – just because somebody is a great jeopardy player doesn’t mean they’re the smartest person in the room. It means they can respond quickly. Many brilliant people process and need time. So I give them time to think. They get equal amounts of time to talk and we do that because the introverted learner likes to know exactly what the time frame is and so does the structured person. And oftentimes in a group setting one person starts talking doesn’t stop when they’re asked to switch. The neurotransmitter break is kind of like the phone ringing right as you’re getting ready to lift the punchline of a good joke. And equal time means that then they can process out. I’ll do another thing or if I call in the audience they will say Would you please tell me what your partner said, rather than asking a person to volunteer. That’s safer for people. But here’s the real key. Sometimes people don’t volunteer. I was working with a group of pharmaceutical sales rep last year and no one ever asked to tell me – they said or their partner said. But it doesn’t matter because the brain processes it. They don’t have there we have to tell anyone. They don’t tell you. They just need to tell somebody else. So if you have if you have an audience share and you say would somebody like to tell me what your partner said or would you like some of your ideas, And no one volunteers, move on. Because their brains already done the work. Many people have no need to tell you what everybody is thinking or what somebody else is thinking. They don’t need to share it with the group. Which means if you’re an audience of a thousand where you can’t call people, you don’t have to. Simply give somebody a chance to know you if you’d lectured for 10 minutes if you talked you said you know turn to your partner and tell your partner something… and give them some time to think. The most incredible thing you’ve been thinking about for the first 10 minutes. Give them time to think about it. They sort it. Give them 30 seconds 30. So in the course of two minutes you’ve done a break where each person had a chance to express something. They know and they’re always talking about takeaways and the speaker and make an action plan. But frankly, if you don’t give people to use the talk, that which you said early, and if they’re writing down notes, they’re not listening because you can’t do both.

Peter: [00:19:23] Right so the thing that caught on the earlier story was you were with a group of pharmaceutical reps and nobody said anything, which to me surprised me.

David: [00:19:32] They were quiet. Well I already had a breakdown of the group. So I knew that the group as a whole was introverted at about 75 percent of the people in a room of 30. There was only one actual extrovert identified in a whole room. So I knew they were going to be reluctant and it’s OK because when I actually had them write down some things, then they wrote it down and they wrote down stuff that was brilliant and what they got from it. But if you study Susan Kane, who wrote a book called Quiet, if we try to force an introvert into speaking we’re crushing them. So if they want to speak they can, if they don’t that’s OK too.

Peter: [00:20:20] I was going to say because the pharmaceutical sales reps that I know can’t stop talking so that’s what kind of threw me for a loop there.

David: [00:20:25] This group I think they were. They process it… They’re on the inside. They’re not in the field.

Peter: [00:20:31] Oh OK.

David: [00:20:32] They work for the company. They’re the ones that process this stuff. Maybe a sales rep was a bad a bad term but they are the ones that make sure everything’s on line and they get the information needs to be gotten to the people in the field and to make sure the accounts are done right and whatever the processing is done correctly. They’re the financial backbone of the company.

Peter: [00:20:52] Now that makes sense. I get that. But I do– And you brought this up you said you know after 10 minutes had them do some type of exercise. Have them converse have them write things down have them reflect. I do remember that being in your session and I do try to do that. I find myself at times forgetting ,and full transparency, but it might be 20 minutes later and I’ll have them do a little exercise where they’re conversing with one another and asked to reflect and think about something. Because I guess it goes to your point if we continue– if we take that old lecture style and we’re just talking at that audience and not having them engage with each other, it’s just boring data. It’s just not connecting with them and it creates this boredom.

David: [00:21:44] Correct yeah. And the other part is you don’t know if they’re getting it or not. You can watch… I mean I’ve had people stand and do the share. Can you stand and share. And I told them at the beginning I know some of you won’t be comfortable with this. I hope you’re sitting by somebody you like, and if you don’t have a partner, I would ask that, during the share, say out loud what you’ve been learning. Even if it’s quietly, please say it out loud. Just don’t sit and think about nothing. We know that works too. There’s a process in the brain that when you verbally say something, you’re activating different parts. People listening might be interested. There’s a YouTube video called The Glass Brain Project. It’s out of the University of California at San Francisco. The researcher… an MEG helmet that reads brain wave activity. And he had his wife blink her eyes and open and close one hand. They recreated it into showing exactly how much of the brain fires in those two simple activities. The brain is a powerful thing. It’s not a muscle, but the neurons allow us to grow and have things happen. I just had a cousin. He’s 31 years old who had brain surgery. We’re waiting for the report. But when he’s recovering he’s not permitted to multitask. If he’s watching television no one’s a lot of talk to him. If he’s even going to talk to me, he has to turn the television off. If he wants to talk to people, he has to either lying down or sitting. If he gets up to walk, he’s not allowed to talk. Or watch television. So all of this is to minimize how much is going on because the brain does so many things on simple activities.

Peter: [00:23:24] Wow I would have never thought that, with a brain injury… well let me ask this question. I am I’m a believer that we cannot multitask but someone once said they were a drummer in a band, and said that you can only multitask when using both hemispheres of the brain versus one hemisphere, and he equated it to when he would play the drums. Is that– is he just blowing smoke?

David: [00:23:53] The old thing about that we only use 10 percent of our brains that is false. Roger Sperry was the researcher who first identified our hemisphere of the brain. Now we have you know words and things form on the left side and artistic on the right side. Actually I just got a new slide at the brain summit and the neural pathways and lateralzation… the corpus callosum is the part of the brain in the center that connects the two halves, which by the way bad news for you and me is that the corpus callosum on men is smaller than that of a female brain.

Peter: [00:24:27] Oh.

David: [00:24:28] Which does account for the reason women sometimes can task shift more easily than men can. But no he wasn’t doing it on one side of the brain. When he was playing the drums, when he was learning the new piece, new thing, learning a new new tap rhythm a new whatever it was going to be. My guess is he didn’t do a lot of talking to people. Then once he got the piece down, then it was different. When I was first learning to play the guitar, as soon as I would try to sing a note my hands would stop. I was like my hands just stopped. Well I was functionally trying to do two thinking processes simultaneously. Once I learned a piece from the guitar well enough to play it, then the playing part became the automatic and the singing harp became something I had to work out.

Peter: [00:25:17] Oh ok. I get that.

David: [00:25:18] Tap your head and rub your stomach simultaneously. Little kids have a hard time doing that.

Peter: [00:25:23] Right.

David: [00:25:23] But it’s yeah… his whatever he was doing the drums when he was actually trying to learn a brand new piece, then it took one I doubt seriously he was multi multi tasking. Because I watched a music teacher one time talk to the kids about doing stomp. He played one piece on his left hand another piece in his right hand. His was a third group. And he talked to them during the entire thing.

Peter: [00:25:47] Wow.

David: [00:25:48] I said How did you have four parts your body going simultaneously. He said practice. OK. Looking back on it I see exactly what it was.

Peter: [00:25:59] He mastered one piece then studied the piece.

David: [00:26:03] You know he grew up… he was an African-American who grew up in a church that everything was done by ear. And you had to learn to do things that way or that wasn’t can happen. He was actually a director of bands at Howard University for a while and he’s a jazz musician and all those things come together. But yeah four different things happening simultaneously. One person.

Peter: [00:26:24] Wow. That’s pretty incredible. And I have shared with you that I’m in the process of writing a book with the working title right now, Financial Storytelling. I’m trying to find a way in this book to help those who tend to teach more technical topics, like accounting or taxation or even architecture or engineering, and getting them away from the way we learned many years ago to a more engaging type of a classroom. And the techniques that we all have talked about should go a long way in that development. But I I’ve always found that we learn from what we see. And when I first started teaching, I learned from my previous teachers and their methods. And it wasn’t really till I joined the National Speakers Association and saw different styles and techniques that were completely opposite… Then my my my my world opened up to a new way of delivering information. How does that– how do you get that across to somebody who has been doing something over a number of years? Say 10-15 years a way, and you show them that they can be more effective in the classroom if they apply some techniques, but they’re reluctant to do so – is it because of the risk because of fear or just because of the hard work?

David: [00:28:04] Well the research on it says that people are comfortable in the status quo. The reason that you for example professional speaker is because their income is based on their ability to attract audiences to hire them. So it’s not as risky for them to try a technique if you know you saw Chad Hyams yesterday and the certain things he does that are highly engaging. And how does he do that? We’ve seen Jeannie Roberson and how she uses the story. I remember Jeannie said that she got her storytelling technique from the Andy Griffith Show, Barney Fife specifically, and using using physical movement the way that Barney Fife did. I remember watching her and going back and watched the old Andy Griffith Show and going doggone it there it is. So there’s that element to it. But you know I I’m looking at I mean I had a professor ask you know about getting a higher rating on his feedback form for students. So when I sat down we did an analysis of how he teaches. It was a hundred percent lecture. He started the beginning of the class period the lecture till the end and the technique I taught him was every eight minutes stop and do that. QRST. Have the students talk to each other. Check for understanding because if they’re not getting what you gave them, you got to reteach it. Rather than finding out on the test exam on Friday or the following Thursday or whatever day it is, you have a chance to make the assessment then. So in teaching we call that a formative assessment. Somehow we try to figure out whether they’re getting it or not. That’s one of the reasons it’s important. What you’re saying too is if people understand the power of the story. I teach school law. Now that could be a boring class. When I had it, we had to memorize laws. But I teach it based on experience as a school superintendent and teacher and I tell stories of people who messed up. And the students are like that can’t possibly be true. Yeah, well, I can’t make this stuff up. You know and I have them look up court cases of really weird things that have happened and they’re dumbfounded by– almost like social media. How dumb can you be thinking I can text what I want and nobody’s going to know. No? You’re creating an international permanent record. So it’s the same thing. What you’re asking — why would people why don’t they change? If they’re still getting an income, would taking the change risk losing any income and they worry or are they just comfortable and they don’t have to do anything new and that makes it easier?

Peter: [00:30:30] As you’re describing and talking about this. My son who’s 17 and waited and finally got his learner’s permit. We put him in top driver so he had like 24 hours of in-class classroom and then we’re going to do the eight hours of driving. And I took him his first day of class and the room was on the second floor of Building and it was the old individual desks like you see in an elementary school or something. The room was beige. It just didn’t have this feel for it. I went oh my god my son’s will get thrown out of class or he’s just going to be bored and not remember anything. And when I picked him up I said so how was it. And he went it wasn’t that bad dad, which shocked me for one. And two I said why wasn’t that bad. Because you told a story the whole time. What do you mean he told you stories the whole time? Well instead of like talking out of the book you know there was a concept or something that he would tell these real life stories that kept their attention. He had to go through six weeks of this driving school on a Sunday from one to about five o’clock and never complained once about going and always left remembering. To the power store, even that you know like a driving school.

David: [00:31:58] The other thing that happens the story is go back to neurons, we have mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are why when you watch a movie you cry even though it’s two dimensional. It’s being done by actors. We cry or laugh at a movie because we have these neurons fire when we empathize with other people and we see other things going on. So when people are hearing stories, they’re also equating that to their own life because they have had things that have happened to them – and they climb inside that story with the storyteller, if they’re good, and they start to live with that person. So we remember experiences better and we’ve had them, and you know and some stories are so powerful that we never forget them. For whatever reason you know it’s sometimes there’s just something that’s incredibly powerful like people remembering where they were when 9/11 happened or I remember where I was… I’m old enough that I was in school when John Kennedy was assassinated. And my brother was graduating college. Wet get up in the morning to go to the store and we heard that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. I remember exactly where we were in all three of those events.

Peter: [00:33:01] Yeah I use that example as it relates to 9/11 because I can tell you exactly where I was, what was happening almost vividly through that whole process of the Stephen Covey event that Franklin university was sponsoring. And I walked out in this restroom there these people hovering around this small portable TV with antennas. What are you watching this? Well it looks like a plane hit the World Trade Center. But didn’t really… you know I was thinking like a little Cessna. And then as I was coming back more and more people start gathering around and people started going into the bar. They had a TV on and I can vividly see that and I can remember walking back into the auditorium and Covey is getting the news of what’s going and the news is starting to travel. And that’s what 17 years ago. And I can still vividly see everything from that day and probably a few days after that.

David: [00:33:58] Well yes. Those are events that triggers certain things on our brain. And that’s why a really well-placed good story when you’re teaching has such a powerful impact. We’re converting like many colleges to teach online now. And what students tell me because I will sometimes run hybrid where they come to class now and then is that man if you come to class — they’ll go on the online like those zoom sessions and say you’re really missing a story. Or will you tell that story about… and it’s different talking to a computer than it is telling a story to a live audience.

Peter: [00:34:31] Right. And if we could do more storytelling to live audiences when we have that opportunity that that level of retention does increase.

David: [00:34:43] Sure and even in accounting. Let’s see if you’re out doing whether it’s accounting auditing or taxation. You start telling stories of some idiotic thing a person did to get in trouble. People hear that.

Peter: [00:34:57] Yeah.

David: [00:34:58] Why would no why would somebody have done that. Why did that treasurer think you could not have to file these reports whatever it might be. You talk about investigations and here’s how to keep yourself out of trouble. I mean a good story is much better than oh let me give you the factual data of how you need to file a such and such form.

Peter: [00:35:17] Well I wrote an ethics course that I’ve delivered this year and the feedback that I’ve gotten from it because I use real life examples. I talk about I talk about Enron, I talk about Wells Fargo and some recent events. And the majority have said something along those lines. I love it that using real world examples than just theory that’s out there because it is part of storytelling. And they they tend to stay awake. And my my my my evaluation scores keep going up.

David: [00:35:51] Correct. And it’s the same thing that I try to do with my teaching a class. I tell students I can’t show you how whatever the concept this doesn’t fit your job, call me out on it because I believe I should do that. I was a theory based superintendent but I converted it all to practical language people can understand.

Peter: [00:36:10] So what type of organizations do you consult with? Who brings you into to study this or get this information?

David: [00:36:19] Mostly I work with schools at the K-12 level and I work with one pharmacy group. I’ve done talks to rotaries and other places. It’s it’s interesting with my background because I was considered a business superintendent for ability to save money and you know keep people’s healthcare from knocking him out of business. But that doesn’t always translate into working with business I’m OK with that. I can help teachers at all levels better understand how to interpret just what students are going through. I teach brain theory too. I’m working with two studies right now at Walsh. One in our doctorate physical therapy program and we have a study going on with the professor who used to have who used to have the highest F rate on campus.

Peter: [00:37:02] Haha.

David: [00:37:02] And he brought me in and I did some coaching of him as students. We applied some of the tools that are that are brain based. And the first time he did it the lowest grade he had was one d. Everybody else was higher than that.

Peter: [00:37:17] Wow.

David: [00:37:18] Which I think also helped him get tenure. And we’re now back in doing another cohort in his class to see you know just get him thinking about it because our preferences often drive us to think other people feel the way we do. But if I can understand where a person is coming from – not their learning preference but how they think about things. Now the need of a student or an audience member to have a tight outline and know exactly when the time’s going to be. That’s important to some people but for somebody who is a visionary they might think you’re putting handcuffs on them. So I need to I need to do both of those things somehow to get to both groups. So I do teach that to people. That’s what I did with the pharmacy group I worked with. And you know how to work with their colleagues because they had two things they had going was hurting them from a business standpoint. 87 percent of the people in the organization have a structural preference. They just wanted to hit deadlines and get it over with and they didn’t have enough conceptual thinkers, and then they were quiet so they never brought something up. The point being, in a business, if they had a deadline of Friday, they liked finishing it on Monday, but then wouldn’t consider new information at all. I said well what’s the critical point? And someone said thursday. So somebody come in with an idea on Wednesday do you look at it? And they said not if we’re done. Which then became a challenge of the organization. So you’re hurting yourselves, you’re losing money, while for them and they were profit-share organizations, like we were losing money. Now we were able to work through that. There comes a time when you listen to somebody who is flexible to change because it can help you. And always being done first is not necessarily the best thing that’s out there. Sometimes being done first hurts you because you don’t consider something new that comes along could help you.

Peter: [00:39:11] That’s very well said. I wholeheartedly agree. And before I forget to ask. How can people… if somebody in my audience wants to contact you, What’s the best way that they should contact you?

David: [00:39:23] I’m ever on the N.S.A. Ohio Web site. My email is pretty easy it’s DocBrobeck at gmail dot com. And I’m always willing to talk to people about how this works and I love it. It’s what my research work is and I’ve been committed to helping whoever it is learn and retain more information for my whole life. This is my 43rd year of teaching and I’ve been speaking professionally for 12 years. It all ties together. I see myself as a teacher who speaks.

Peter: [00:40:01] I used you as an example yesterday about your evaluations and how being a member of NSA and seeing these different things really have helped you in the classroom to a VIP member yesterday questioning would this help me at work and the stuff that they do.

David: [00:40:19] Well yeah there’s… I can’t remember the last name. His first name was Joel. He talked about success comes in cans and he had he was old school. He was showing how you use transparencies an overhead projector. Didn’t use PowerPoint. But he had a structure that he like how he laid out his events. I’ve used that use as a classroom teacher. I’ve used that and every presentation I’ve done, whether it’s an NSA type presentation or I’m speaking to an audience of college professors. I go right down through that thing exactly how he taught it. And when I got hired at Walsh they said that might have been the most structured demo lesson we’ve ever seen. Well it all came off NSA Ohio.

Peter: [00:41:03] Wow. How long ago was that do you remember?

David: [00:41:05] Well we were at the Crowne Plaza.

Peter: [00:41:07] Oh.

David: [00:41:07] In Columbus so it’s been a while.

Peter: [00:41:10] It’s been a while. I was trying to look up his name and see if we can find that information.

David: [00:41:20] He was he was older then because I turned 64 this year. And I just don’t remember – can’t remember his name. Shame on me. I think it’s because I’m getting old.

Peter: [00:41:33] You don’t look 64 my friend. I hope to look as good as you do when I’m 64. I say I tell people I’m the body of an 80 year old in the mind of a 35 year old. So that gives you some idea.

David: [00:41:46] Joe Weldon is his name. I just looked it up. The keynote speaker has his line is success comes in cans.

Peter: [00:41:56] OK cool. I’m glad you did that. Thank you so very much. David thank you again for taking time. I’m fascinated by our conversation which makes me want to continue to learn more and more about how the brain interacts, and ways that we can engage that classroom. I think in today’s day and age, it’s a must that we begin moving in this direction. And I can’t thank you enough my friend.

David: [00:42:21] You’re welcome Peter.

Peter: [00:42:26] I would like to thank David again for spending time on this episode talking about the brain and how we can make learning fun and engaging. Before I close, I would like to take a moment to talk about the first five episodes of this podcast are now qualified for CPE self-study credit in the NASBA category of personal development. Those interviews are with Clarke Price, former CEO of the Ohio society of CPAs. Mike Sciortino, author of Gratitude Marketing. Tom Hood… Well you’ve been introduced to him and you will be introduced to him again. Ed Mendlowitz, who’s a partner at Withum, Smith, and Brown. And Karl Ahlrichs, who’s H.R. professional at Gregory and Appel. These episodes are located on the MACPA-BLI self-study Web site and they are mobile friendly. Create an account and purchase an episode. You can listen to them on your daily commute or while working out, or even at your desk! When you’re finished, take the review and final exam on your mobile device or your computer. It’s that easy. While all Improv is no Joke podcasts are available on my web site, only those purchased to the MACPA-BLI self-study Website are eligible for CPE self-study credit. This is not nano-learning – this is self-study learning. You can get detailed instructions by visiting my website at PeterMargaritis.com and clicking on the graphic: Listen, Learn, and Earn improvs is no joke podcasts on my home page. I hope you enjoy this exciting and flexible new way of receiving CPE credit. And please take a moment to ssubscribe to my podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play so you won’t miss an upcoming episode. Also if you’ve been enjoying this podcast, I would greatly appreciate it if you take a few moments and leave a review on iTunes. Thank you very much for taking the time to do that. Now November is National Diabetes Month and I’ll be donating 20 percent of all paperback and audiobook sales from my web site to the juvenile diabetes research foundation. Each Improv is no Joke: Using Improvisation to Create Positive Results in Leadership and Life that is purchased from my website is personally signed. The book retails for $14.99 and the shipping is free. To order go to PeterMargaritis.com and click the available now icon. In addition, you can download improvs no joke audio book for 14.99 so you can listen on the go. And remember 20 percent of all sales in the month of November will be donated to juvenile diabetes research foundation. Now I’m in the process of writing my next book with the working tieless financial storytelling and I’m previewing content on my social media. So connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. In episode 77, My guest is Colin Blalock, who’s a shareholder with the accounting firm of Jones and Cobb in Atlanta, Georgia. Now our conversation centers around why the audience focuses on your body language, then your words that you are saying, to see if they are concurrent. So remember to use the principles of improvisation to better connect with your colleagues, your peers, and your family.

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Improv is no Joke – Episode 73 – Dr. Alan Patterson

Peter: [00:00:00] Welcome to episode 73. Today my guest is Dr. Alan Patterson, who has more than three decades of international business experience. In 2006, he formed Mentore, a consulting practice specializing in leadership and organizational development. His expertise has been tapped by many global and national businesses and organizations including Anheuser-Busch, Biogen, the Federal Reserve Bank, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard, Major League Baseball, and the United States Navy. He is the author of Leader Evolution: From Technical Expertise to Strategic Leadership. Dr. Patterson has been a college lecturer and He’s a frequent presenter at several state and national conferences. He’s the past board chair of Fond du Lac, a Boys and Girls Club, and is a member of the Fond du Lac woman’s Fund board. I’ve known Alan for a number of years because he’s in one of the thought leaders at the business learning institute. Alan thank you so very much for taking time out of your hectic and busy schedule to be a guest on my podcast.

Alan: [00:01:01] Peter this is this is a privilege more than it is anything else. I’m privileged to be with you and your audience.

Peter: [00:01:08] Oh thank you so very much. I know my audience is going to enjoy this conversation today. So I’ve given the audience a little bit about your background. What else can you tell us about the Dr. Alan PATTERSON?

Alan: [00:01:22] Well the Dr. Alan Patterson… I can tell you that I started my career in education. I got a doctorate in education way back when they still weren’t writing on tablets but they weren’t at computers.

Peter: [00:01:39] Haha.

Alan: [00:01:40] And I always had an interest in the consulting training and development field. So I made that switch back in the 80s and worked for a couple of consulting groups then joined two of my partners for almost 20 years in Providence, Rhode Island, doing similar kind of consulting I’ve done before in the past. And it was all about that competency development range finding out those additional factors that make somebody successful in that job well beyond technical expertise. And 2006 was a momentous year because we we split up – it was all amicable. I decided to continue on my own and had been doing that. While my background is not the same as yours Peter and I’m sure many of your guests – I’m more out of the social science psychology side of life than I am a CPA. I don’t have that designation or background, yet I’ve been fortunate and doing some work over the years starting with AICPA. And then when I met through the business learning institute and I you know I was trying to think today I think it’s it’s I think it’s 10 years. It may even be a little bit longer. 2005 for some reason pops up my mind definitely 2007 before 2008. So I have some familiarity of working with folks in your field in the field of finance and accounting, both public accounting and business and industry. So what can I say? I’m a lone ranger. Hired gun. You need help? The doctor is in. Somebody wanted one of my marketing guys years ago wanted to call me that the doctor of business – organizational development something like that and I thought well that’s a pretty good title.

Peter: [00:03:36] Yeah that is.

Alan: [00:03:37] Organizational coach, not an individual coach.

Peter: [00:03:40] So you say you were I mean you’ve worked with CPAs for a while. And what are some of the courses that you’ve been that you have worked with them through the business lending institute?

Alan: [00:03:49] Well even before then one of the first courses I did with AICPA I call From a Controller to CFO. And what the differences were in those jobs as I understood them and that that theme really is the basis for the book that I wrote, which happy to chat about briefly and in a few minutes. So that course from technical or financial expert to strategic business leader is one of the more popular courses that I do with a business learning institute. How to operate as a partner and strategist to the business. High performance teams. I’m rerecording some webcasts right now to include what I’m going to title what it takes to be a successful first time manager. Then other courses along the way of building trust and credibility. So it’s all on the the side of building relationships getting more savvy about the business. Less on the wall not even less. Nothing on the technical side. I’m not the I’m not the guy you hired to do a tax update, if I would we’d probably all end up in jail. But if you need you need a kick in the pants about a delegation I probably your guy.

Peter: [00:05:13] Yeah you’re much. We use the term soft skills and I’m not a fan of the term but I found a way that kind of connects with people. So we may call them soft but actually pretty hard to master.

Alan: [00:05:28] Yeah that’s a good way to.

Peter: [00:05:30] And I get the light bulb body and then and then I think Tom Hood has just gotten rid of and just call them hard skills.

Alan: [00:05:37] Yeah I’ve had clients correct me and say they’re not soft at all.

Peter: [00:05:41] They’re not. And so when that first course that you did with the CPA back in the day and to what you’re doing today. Have you seen any change in that AUDIENCE MEMBER? Are they coming maybe a little bit more prepared. They have a little bit more these interpersonal skills than they did back in the day? Or are you not seeing very much of a change?

Alan: [00:06:05] Well I think you know it’s funny you say that because that first course I did for AICPA I recall was 1997 and Goldman’s book came out 95 – Emotional Intelligence – but it wasn’t it wasn’t described that way. I think I found more people aware of the emotional intelligence side of life and its place than Job Success and business success. Having said that there is still a group of people that will will articulate that the interpersonal skills is not their strength and I don’t think… so from that vantage point I don’t think it’s changed at all. Maybe this is just gut. I think there’s more recognition that there’s another set of success factors. Yet I think the profession, much like… I work with a lot of scientists engineers I.T. people. It’s a very very similar pattern that what drew them into the profession was not the selling your ideas. It was it was doing the work. It’s doing the work.

Peter: [00:07:23] There’s a book you should read it’s called if you are If I understood you, would I have this look on my face? and it’s by Alan Alda and it’s along the same lines of you know in the scientific community on how he’s found a way to you know get his audience to understand him by putting things in not in scientific terms but in plain English.

Alan: [00:07:46] Yeah. Well that you know that’s that’s funny you should mention that. In doing some recent writing, the fundamental skills – the real differentiators… well they’re both fundamental and differentiators, which sounds like an oxymoron. In my mind, on the communication side, the big three still far and away. Number one is active listening. Number two is communicating the level of the audience understanding. And number three is understand the perspective the people you’re talking to. I mean that’s that – those haven’t changed, and they’re still there and I and I will tell you as I tell my clients: I can’t believe I’m making money going to organizations telling them that they have to listen– They have to be better at listening. And there’s nothing– No one is immune from that. So the more senior you are, there’s no guarantee that you’re a better listener. (Maybe just the opposite.)

Peter: [00:08:47] I would agree with that. It’s when I’ve worked with audiences you know that active listening – that listening to understand is a component in improv, and whether it’s 20 people in the room or 100 people room I’ll Ask the question how many of you feel like you’re good listeners? and I may get less than 1 percent of the hands going up. And then I’ll ask how many of you are interruptors and I’ll get about 75 percent of the hands up.

Alan: [00:09:14] Yeah. Well I I say — and this is this is I take this on as a personal challenge to your audience here. Think of somebody you know that’s a good listener. Think of one person you know that’s a good listener. And talk about that person and what they’re like and what that person means to you. And it’s it’s pretty… it’s pretty dynamic. So I think that’s one of the biggest compliments somebody can give another person – because good listener doesn’t mean you’re a pushover. But it’s at the root of so many of the issues that you know… what what was what’s the latest issue. I think the latest issue the 2010 decade issue is pivot, but before that it was Team work. No before that was empowerment before that was team and before that was communication. I mean what are we talking about? You know it’s still there.

Peter: [00:10:12] Yeah it hasn’t changed. And I think to some degree I think the larger your organization gets larger and larger and larger, the listening goes down considerably because decisions have already been made. They’re not really looking for input. And thatt thing about listening is you know to be in to be an active listener or someone who listens to understand – you got to park your agenda. You got to park what you’re coming to the table with and be focused and give that undivided attention to the individual, even while they’re talking you can still process information and when they’re done ask a question. Make a comment. Add to the conversation.

Alan: [00:10:52] Putting aside the fact that that dialogue and civil discourse are in the crapper. Just the listening part of this to me is pretty intriguing cause, Again, Daniel Goleman… you see where he’s headed now. You know he’s written a book on a couple of years ago on focus. So this has come out of emotional intelligence interest and now he’s into mindfulness. And so it’s it’s a low level of distraction that people are dealing with… It’s not just distraction. First of all it’s it’s just that day to day morass of incoming God knows what, and heaped upon that is how do you know where the priorities are if you don’t have your head screwed on straight? It’s put the need to to listen at a premium. And a lot of people are talking. That doesn’t help. It’s not that you have to listen to all the talking. It’s just that you know when you need to focus, and you do and it’s more meaningful productive conversation. And how many of those conversations are tied to decisions? So it’s a business issue. It’s not just a social interaction issue.

Peter: [00:12:09] And it’s funny it’s funny you should say that. So last week I was in Omaha. Nebraska. driving to Lincoln, Nebraska, and there was a billboard sign that really caught my eye. It was a mutual of Omaha billboard and I think if my memory serves me correct it said we start by listening first, or something along those lines. And that’s that’s one of the few billboards I’ve ever seen where they’re addressing come and talk to us. We’re not going to talk to you – we’ll get to listen to you first to understand what your needs or wants are before we make any type of response.

Alan: [00:12:47] I mean you think about it and even just take this conversation we’re having as an example. This is fundamental. I mean this is what you want people to master. Soft skill, hard skill, what kind of skill you want to talk? Communication skills. OK well Isn’t this fundamental? And it is because there’s so much that has to happen that’s based on doing this successfully. We’re not even talking about the business per se. We’re not talking about professional development per se. I would say this: I think the people that don’t have those skills – the emotional intelligence, the empathy, the character, moral, courage, relationship management, influence, persuasion – all those things that I talk about and you do as well. They will, guaranteed, top out in their career, and they will be frustrated in their career because they will be passed over or put in a box or put in the corner or put in the time out place. You know that’s what it boils down to. It’s not that it’s not the knowledge side. It’s not the technical, the financial side. And so I would I’ve even said Peter… I think the characterization of a subject matter expert is not just that they know a lot and have a lot of experience. They know a lot, have a lot of experience, they’re approachable, available, and visible to other people to help them solve their problem. There you go.

Peter: [00:14:18] Perfect. So this this this active listening this empathy this this what what seems to be lacking. How do you how did you tackle this? Because as you were describing all of that I I I have one small rebuttal to that comment, especially as it relates to public accounting because I’ve I’ve talked to firms and they recognize that some of the staff who have made it up maybe to a senior manager level… that they provide something to the firm from a strictly technical perspective. They’re not going to drive any business. So instead of making them an equity partner, they give them a directorship level. Not an equity partner. They’re not expected to go up and bring in business, but they’re expected to be the subject matter expert, technically, inside of that organization. And I’ve I’ve only seen that in a few firms in public accounting. But you don’t see that business and industry .I have no run and that acceptance.

Alan: [00:15:18] Let’s just look at it this way. I’m not saying those positions don’t exist. I’m not saying that people are not valuable to an organization for anything other than their subject matter expertise. I would say there is a baseline, a threshold, that has to exist, if nothing more on the approachability side, and the understanding and willingness to be clear and… would have a way to engage people. They don’t have to be an extrovert. They don’t have to be Dr. Margaritis getting up on the stage doing improv. You know I often find people saying well you know I’m an introvert. Like I don’t care. That’s not the point. The point is that you still have to have a baseline of understanding beyond just the technical or financial knowledge. Yeah I remember a guy I used to work with years ago and I love this guy. He was a he was one of the founders of this process that created this very generic now highly successful software and something or other. And he’s the only guy in the world now that said I don’t want any distractions. Give me an interior office with no windows. And it’s like just to let me do my thing. I don’t want to manage other people. And yet he was one of the most approachable people I ever met because he he loved what he did and he was just so good at it. He was he was great.

Peter: [00:17:02] And I think about a lot of people who may get into the accounting profession because maybe they they want to do that kind of the exact same thing, and maybe they’re introverted and maybe they “don’t like people.” But I think in today’s world, if you’re coming into the profession like that, then in order to excel, in order to grow your career, in order to move up the ladder, you’re going to have to find a way to make those connections and start liking people, and if you’re a public accountant driving business, networking, business development, or you will be moved to the side.

Alan: [00:17:36] Yeah I mean you said this you may see those people who are subject matter experts. They’re put in some type of directorship and not an equity partner. Listen I don’t think… I found out in that course good going from controller to CFO… I had several people over the course of the three or four years I was doing this that would come up to me at the end of the day. These were long ago in the days of 8 hour oh my god can I hang on to it at myself eight hour workshop. People come off at the end of the day… some people will come up and say you know what I don’t want to be a CFO. That’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to deal with that maybe the business and accounting side. It is just on the political side. It’s like nobody says you have to. So nobody says you have to be an equity partner. Nobody says you have to be head of the lab. Nobody says you have to be an engineering director. You want to be an engineer? Fine. I’m just saying. And it’s a point you made. What’s your personal goal in all of that? And if it’s to have a broader impact, which most people want, or feel that you’ve been more successful, than what I would say is… Well there’s a little more than what you what you signed up for. Actually there is a lot more, but I’m not telling you don’t do that. I’m not telling you to not be the tax guru or the audit guru. I said go for it. I’m just saying that real success, and especially from a business perspective, that the success there lies with not just understanding, but really a solid use to mastery of different skill sets. It’s different.

Peter: [00:19:21] Solid use to mastery. So I can come and take one of your eight hour, four hour, two hour.

Alan: [00:19:29] 20 minute.

Peter: [00:19:30] 20 minute whatever it is and then I’m going to have that mastery after that.

Alan: [00:19:36] Yeah. No. I don’t. I. I make no claims. I mean about that. I don’t think that’s– you know people want the easy answer. I’ll say OK here I’m going to give you the easy answer. You have to learn how to influence other people, and influence is based on credibility. I don’t have– there’s no shortcut. There’s being smarter about it, but there’s no there’s no shortcut.

Peter: [00:19:58] There’s no shortcut. But I think people go… I think it was actually what Simon Sinek, I was watching one of his videos, and he made a comment that I can’t teach you leadership. I can give you some tools, if you come to one of my sessions or watch a TED talk. I can present you with the tools. However you have to practice it every single day to get the master level but what happens with that AUDIENCE MEMBER? They go right back to work the next day or the following Monday. And they get stuck back into that rut.

Alan: [00:20:27] Well you know mastery.. who do you want to read about talking about mastery? I mean there are several gurus out there, Sinik being one of them. And it’s — all of them that I’ve read say the same thing is that it’s drudgery. There’s nothing there’s nothing about mastery that will be exciting. It’s the day to day overreaching. You know how many thousands of free throw shots did Michael Jordan do? How many hours of practice does a classical violinist do? How much time does the Olympic swimmer spend in the water at all hours of the day and night? And I mean this is I don’t… you and I are a little bit different age but probably in the same broad category of our career. You know how much of what you know now is based on 20, 30 years of experience? That you wouldn’t have had earlier. And that that to me is now is– the legacy I want to have is I don’t think there are shortcuts. I do think that there are ways to get people focused early on in their career to be very clear and understanding what are the skills, what are the practices, what are the techniques that you can use to be successful, and head this off in the past when you’re going to hit a point in your career when you when you are thinking OK what does it mean and how do how do I get to the next level. Well it’s going to be a different skill set. That’s what I’m going to tell you. It’s not going to be knowing more. At least know more about accounting or finance. It is going to be learning how to be to be successful in working through other people and selling your ideas. And it’s going to be a ton about learning the business, not finance and accounting. You want a seat at the table? That’s how you get it. You get to seat at the table cause you understand the business, not because you’re good looking like you or me.

Peter: [00:22:37] Haha. So two things here. We’ll come back to that last piece that you said, but as you were you were talking about that drudgery. Maybe it’s made me think of a quote. I love this quote quote as by Robert Schuller: Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular preparation.

Alan: [00:22:56] That’s what it is. Yeah I had a doctor when I was like 13 years old I broke my arm. Yet again. He had already put me to sleep. But he knocked me out for a lot of reasons. But I remember he told my mother and she told me he said what I’m going to do in the next five minutes took me eight years of medical school and beyond to learn.

Peter: [00:23:23] Yeah.

Alan: [00:23:23] It’s like oh OK. Sure go ahead and snap it back into place. I’m all for it.

Peter: [00:23:32] Make sure that I’m knocked out please. So going back to the other thing you said: getting to know the business. We have to understand the business, and the business is more than just the finance side of the business – it is operational, and we in the profession have been talking for a long time. We want to be our client, and I use that term in a broad base. Whether it’s public accounting or whether it’s a B&I, I want to be my clients trusted business advisor, and there’s a difference between the trusted business advisor versus a trusted financial advisor.

Alan: [00:24:00] No doubt.

Peter: [00:24:01] And I did– I wrote about two years ago basically it said it’s time it’s time for us to get up from behind our desk. And the premise of it was if you want to be the trusted business advisor, you need to explore the business – not just the financials. The whole business in totality.

Alan: [00:24:17] Peter, I would say it’s more. It’s not that you have to explore the business. It’s you have to know the business. You start off with the exploration. So let’s imagine people had you or me as their coach. You and I together. What would you be telling somebody that’s 10 12 — maybe not 10, but 12, 15 years in their career? You start off with OK. Well you know what you know on the finance insight, on the accounting side. What do you need to do to build that out? How do you stay on top of it? OK here’s the deal. From this point forward that’s a given you don’t get extra credit. Let’s talk about the people you need to be in front of and how you do that, and how you have your visible and available to people– that you are more visible to people that you haven’t seen or that have seen you or know you. And then at that same mark you’re going to say OK let’s talk about how you learn about the business. You know what you know… where’s the business headed? what are the trends? I mean this is where all this strategic stuff kicks in. But for somebody that’s in there I don’t know what would 15 years of experience be in this day and age… mid 30s or so? It’s like OK you want to depending on where you’re going and where you’re headed. Even as a high level individual contributor I would say that differentiator there in terms of successful performance are still on the business side. There’s there’s an understanding and knowledge of the business and how the business makes money, and the fact that you know finance and accounting is– you’re in a position that most people are in the business. They don’t get to see what you see. They don’t know what you know. So you can wow them with your knowledge of I don’t know what what what do you need knowledge of these days? International tax codes or or which country we need to do our assembly and where do we manufacture. You can know all those things and that’s valuable. But it’s that you understand what that business is doing. Where you can say you want to save money? We need to go here not there. Or let’s talk about the risk. I mean this is not my specialty. This is your audience’s specialty. It’s like you want to you want to talk about this now – not about taking risk, but how you understand what risk looks like, and the risk that you’re about to take out. So that’s that’s the business advisor part. It’s like yeah it’s it’s a crapshoot. Just as long as you understand what’s there and how we stay legal and you know maintain our reputation and do what we can do. It’s like let’s just know it. Ready set let’s go.

Peter: [00:27:09] And I take it there’s probably a lot of the content in your book. What do you tell that AUDIENCE MEMBER… How do how– what’s the one key thing that they need to start working on today to take them from technical expertise to that strategic leader?

Alan: [00:27:25] Well it depends on where you are.

Peter: [00:27:26] OK.

Alan: [00:27:27] Because the one thing is going to look different.

Peter: [00:27:29] I’m controler going to be a CFO. I’m a CFO that wants to maybe move to the C-suite.

Alan: [00:27:36] Broader visibility, broader understanding of the business, and providing that guidance and opinion – and selling those ideas to others. You got to be– I had a colleague a number years ago. This was on the H.R. side, not the finance side, and she was the number two H.R. person in a Defense Department contractor of over hundred thousand employees. And I said Well so what’s your day look like? And she said I’m in meetings all day. I said Oh you must hate that. She said Are you kidding? I love it. Most of the time I’m with the people I need to be influencing. So you want to take that next step? That’s what you’ve got to do. And it’s not going to happen from controller to CFO. It’s you you started that– you have to have that credibility, that expertise not just on the finance and accounting side, but on this broader application side sooner, and the CFO part comes because… I mean how do you get those jobs? Because you go into a smaller company or you’re CFOs moved over to a different company or you CROs moved on and you’re in there on the bench for that ready to come up. Hopefully you’ve gotten those additional experiences. And it’s really you know it’s that that understanding — it’s not you understanding, it’s being a part of those decisions.

Peter: [00:29:09] When you were describing your H.R. person at the defense contracts it reminded me of a story of a good friend of of my wife and I. When she started a career in retail, and she started in H.R., she didn’t have a college degree when she started. And she says to this day I could never have… today she probably wouldn’t have gotten hired. So but she went from no degree as a H.R. specialist, and over her career, when she retired, she retired as the executive vice president of Human Resources for a Fortune 500 company. And I asked her how did she do that. And she said I had to get my technical side of the business down, but once I got to become manager I had to understand how the business worked – and this is what gave me the idea for the article. I had to understand how our business works, so I went to sales and asked how do how do we support you? What do you need? She went to customer service, she went to distribution. Then she said I had to come to finance and talk to the CFO, and he was talking chinese to me. So I had to get him to put accounting into a language where I understood, and how we supported the business. And she was one of the trusted business advisors of a Fortune 500 company. And I just loved that story. But to the same to the same discussion.

Alan: [00:30:31] And distill that down for me, Peter, as the master improv entrepreneur consultant educator entertainer that that you are – distill that skillset down of this colleague of yours and friend of you and your wife. What is it that she did? What’s the skills that she use that made her successful?

Peter: [00:30:53] Oh she is. She is the master communicator for one. She connects well with everybody. She’s she’s very she’s very firm and she holds her ground. But great on managing relationships, great on building relationships, and and having empathy. I think those are her big skill sets reflecting back, as well as she’s a very very driven individual.

Alan: [00:31:21] Which now that we’re not going to teach anybody.

Peter: [00:31:24] No you can’t you can’t teach that.

Alan: [00:31:26] We’ll take intrinsic motivation and put kind of put that one aside and say that you can’t develop that. I mean if you did it’d take you… you’d die before you could really help somebody so… But there you go. That’s what it is. Great communicator. Great understanding. Great listener. But look what she did. And this is the crux of what I say about how to be a partner and strategist in the business – what I’ve done, and I encourage anybody to do. You don’t have to read my book to do this: You need to go out and talk to people and listen, and you know what we call that? We’ve got a name for that.

Peter: [00:32:06] What’s that?

Alan: [00:32:07] That’s called a dialogue.

Peter: [00:32:11] Haha.

Alan: [00:32:11] That’s not problem solving. Do you remember what a dialogue is? I said a dialogue is when people go for mutual understanding – understanding is not agreement. It’s talking without listening. Those are dueling monologues, and you can’t take dueling monologues and say because you’ve got two or more people going it’s a dialogue. No. She went out and said Tell me about how we support you. Tell me what your challenges are. If we were to do one thing better what would that look like? I’ve been thinking about this. What would that do to your group or How would that impact your group? Oh OK great idea. Hold that thought. I want to go talk to somebody else and see how they see it and bring that back to you. Is that something I can do? Well of course yeah. You’re talking about my business of course you can. You’re going to help me. So I just take… This is the competency approach. You just take your colleague, your friend, take what I mean take is you watch her, you observe her. You then start to say OK what are the skills the behaviors tools techniques that she uses. And then you go to people that may or may not have said OK here’s what you need to do. You want to be a partner and strategist? Here’s what you have to do. You have to pick those people that are that are are not just in the critical path, but there’s some priority around them, and then you go out and you talk to them. You need to ask open ended questions, you need to probe, you need to listen. You need to decide what else you need. You know what you can and can’t do. Don’t make these problem solving sessions initially because everybody wants to solve the problem. But I’m saying there is a problem solving aspect, but the basis of the relationship is the dialogue.

Peter: [00:33:56] And sometimes we– I I spoke to a partner in a firm and she made a comment that she could speak to 4-500 people in a presentation and have no worries about it, but to get in a smaller conversation with maybe three or four people. That was a challenge for her. That was a struggle. Chris Jenkins, who is the CEO of the South Carolina Association of CPAs. He was sharing on the episode that we recorded something similar to that, and how he got past that to be able to engage in conversation. He said that when he was at the Ohio society they brought in a presentation specialist, and basically he told Chris next time you’re in the elevator, strike up a conversation with the person there. And then you know introduce yourself and say this is what you’re working on, this is the challenge I’ve been given. And he did it and he kept doing it and he kept doing it and he kept doing it, and despite all the restraining orders he’s had– I’m just kidding. But I mean he just he just kept doing it and put it in a play to the point that it’s now second nature. Being in a group of a smaller group and being part of that dialogue, or getting into that dialogue.

Alan: [00:35:16] You know what’s ironic to me about it, Peter, is the questions are really simple. And the goal is to have people talk and for you to understand what they’re talking about. So you know why do we talk about the weather? Why do we talk about the Red Sox? Why do we talk about the hurricane? We’re talking– We’re trying to figure out a way to see what– Those are things we share in common, or at least we have an opinion on. Right. The weather is pretty obvious but that’s you know how was your weekend. All those things are intended to look, or should be intended to look for ways that we connect. I mean I don’t know about you. I have no problem. As a matter of fact, it’s just the opposite for me. I can talk to anybody in an elevator. It doesn’t take anything. You know I get in an elevator coming back from the airport. I mean I’m in you know going up to the car somebody is there with a suitcase. Well are they are they coming back home or are they going out? Well they’re not going out. They’re coming home. Where have you been? You know I bet you’re glad to get home. So yes I think the point I think people may miss it and that’s one thing I have done– I did a few months ago with a client in Florida through BLI and it was about how to be a partner and strategist. I said OK let’s make this a little scientific. Let’s create a protocol. That’s a fancy way of saying five open ended questions. I want you to think of a specific person you have in mind where you can go in and talk to them and listen to them. And guess what? You get to say in this too. Dialogue goes both ways. It’s just that you’re doing the initiation. You don’t go in and say OK I want to be your business partner, which everybody wants to be so big deal. But this is this is something that looks a lot different. And that’s what you know when you’re sitting down with three or four people that’s what makes it real. You know it’s not just anonymous. OK here’s one good idea. It’s like no I want to know how we– I need to understand manufacturing better if I’m an H.R. professional. How am I going to serve you? I’m a I’m a finance professional. I’m a business analyst. I’m good at what I do. I want to understand where this business is headed or this part that I support of the business. I want to understand where that said and what this is going to look like and what the implications are. I want to know that stuff. And most people will talk to you about that. Business people, if they’re good, because they need the help.

Peter: [00:37:54] They do. And there also has to be a level of trust before before anything is exchanged really there has to be at least a baseline of trust and respect.

Alan: [00:38:04] There’s no doubt that that’s just part of so. So this again to be a consultant here this is how do you break that down into its component parts? And it’s not saying I want to be your business partner. It’s taking those opportunities where you work together or finding or creating those, and then being successful. Commit and deliver. And the more you do that, the more you build on it, the more you trust it. And the more you trust it, the more you can find out about what their challenges are and what keeps them up at night. And now we’re talking for the long haul. I mean that’s that’s… But the success is built on actually accomplishing a project, a goal, an activity – not just one but many. That’s how you do it. I kind of back into it. I thought well let’s just do let’s play You know going into a group play we are the world, hold hands, and say Peter I want to be your business partners and we’re here to support you and all that other kind of B.S. that nobody buys. You go toe to toe and work on something now, Now you got it. Now you have a chance.

Peter: [00:39:15] Exactly. I mean it’s you know it seems so simple as we talk about it but we know that it’s difficult in application.

Alan: [00:39:24] No doubt.

Peter: [00:39:25] And it just it just — persistence. It just takes that will that that the drive. Not everybody has it, But like I said most people do. Just.

Alan: [00:39:38] Well here it is and it is… you know you make a great point because I’ll tell folks… it’s like well I didn’t get invited to the meeting. Well why do you think that would be the case? If you’re a roadblock… if you knew somebody was a roadblock would you invite them to the meeting? No. So you tell them what to do well after the fact. If you’ve got something that can provide… an opinion that’s you know an expert opinion, that’ll get you that’ll get you there. That should get you invited to the meeting. Oh sometimes you have to invite yourself. Maybe they didn’t think about it. Maybe you were an oversight or it just didn’t think– it didn’t occur to someone that it might be financial implication. And when you find out about it, invite yourself. Now where does that come from? Is that is that intrinsic drive? I think it is in part.

Peter: [00:40:29] Yeah I agree.

Alan: [00:40:30] I think you have to be willing to go out there, if that’s not something that comes natural to you. But it’s with that in mind… there is so much gray in this world. That’s why I could never be a good accountant. I can’t see black or white. I can’t say anything… I can say that everything’s — not numbers maybe but yeah maybe it’s you know it’s still perception and negotiable. It’s like OK you know you can’t do that with everything. But the point is there’s a lot more… I liken it to back in the day when I used to do more running. You’d be in a race road race and you know right from the get go, or from like you know a quarter or a half mile out, or longer, you start to see the crowd start to spread out and there were lots of openings and you just go for it. And it’s like well that that’s the day light that people can operate in a lot of things. It seems like things are nailed down? Nothing’s nailed down.

Peter: [00:41:30] You’re right.

Alan: [00:41:32] That’s not fair say but you know what I mean?

Peter: [00:41:34] Yeah I know where you are going with that.

Alan: [00:41:34] Because things are nailed down, but not as many as you think.

Peter: [00:41:38] Don’t look at it as an obstacle, look at it as an opportunity.

Alan: [00:41:42] There you go. Thank you.

Peter: [00:41:43] So where can they find your book? What can my audience find your book From Technical Expert to Strategic Leadership?

Alan: [00:41:50] Yeah. Yeah. They can find it. I hope they’re sitting down and have a pencil in hand – they’re gonna find it at this company. It’s called Amazon. And they’ll find it there, or they can contact me directly. I’d be happy to ship out a copy for them.

Peter: [00:42:18] And how could they contact you?

Alan: [00:42:21] My email address is apatterson@mentore.com. That’s mentor with an E. It’s the Italian word for mentor and I thought it sounded neat. I hope I’m somebody’s mentor before I die.

Peter: [00:42:45] Well you are you are a mentor to a lot of people. Those those who attend your sessions. Those who watch your videos. Those who listen to this. One of the things I love about doing this podcast. I learn so much from all of my guests. This is going to be I think episode 73, and I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned so much today. I mean you’ve given me some additional ideas and some additional thoughts. And you’re a great mentor.

Alan: [00:43:14] Well thank you Peter.

Peter: [00:43:16] And I look forward in the future to having you back on the podcast.

Alan: [00:43:20] You can get me any time.

Peter: [00:43:22] Any time.

Alan: [00:43:25] I’m like I’m like a fast food. I’m cheap and tasty.

Peter: [00:43:38] Hahaha!

Alan: [00:43:38] I hope I hope that makes the cut.

Peter: [00:43:41] That’s going to make the cut. Haha.

Alan: [00:43:41] There’s another way to describe it, but I don’t want to say it. I just don’t want to say it.

Peter: [00:43:48] Oh my God.

Alan: [00:43:50] To get to talk to somebody that loves what they do… How cool is that Peter? That’s that’s what you and I have in common. This is cool stuff.

Peter: [00:44:03] Yeah.

Alan: [00:44:03] This is fun!

Peter: [00:44:04] This is this is this is passion– hahaha. I’m just going to let this.

Alan: [00:44:12] Let it simmer.

Peter: [00:44:14] Let it simmer for the rest of the day and I’ll just hysterically break out in laughter throughout the day. Well Alan thank you so very much once again for being a guest, and I know the audience is thoroughly going to have enjoyed our conversation.

Alan: [00:44:33] I hope so. Thank you Peter.

—

Improv is no Joke – Episode 72 – Bill Sheridan

Bill: [00:00:00] You know what happens when more and more of the stuff the accounting and finance professionals have been trained to do and have been doing for years are now being done by machines? What does that mean for our profession?

[music]

Peter: [00:00:23] Welcome to Improv is no Joke podcast, where it’s all about becoming a more effective communicator by embracing the principles of improvisation. I’m your host Peter Margaritis, the self-proclaimed chief edutainment officer of my business, the Accidental Accountant. My goal is to provide you with thought provoking interviews with business leaders so you can become an effective improviser, which will lead to building stronger relationships with clients, customers, colleagues, and even your family. So let’s start to show.

[music]

Peter: [00:00:55] Hey welcome to episode 72 of improv is no joke podcast today my guest is Bill Sheridan. He’s a chief communications officer at the Maryland Association of CPAs, and he is now a repeat offender on this podcast. Bill welcome to the podcast.

Bill: [00:01:13] Thank you Peter. Good to be back.

Peter: [00:01:15] It’s nice having you back. And this is actually this conversation is going to tail from episode 67 that I did with Tom Hood the CEO of the Maryland association. In that episode, he mentioned something about a white paper that was being published by the MACPA. And I got my hands on it and it’s titled Human Work in the Ages of Machines: Five Steps for Building a Future-Ready Finance Team by Bill Sheridan. That’s going to be our conversation today. I want to know more about. I read it. I loved it. It makes sense it’s powerful. It should be read by every CPA in our community and that’s in the speaking global community about how technology is impacting us. So let’s have this conversation about what this White Paper. What spurred you to put this together? Because I know we’ve talked about it in the past. This topic and Tom’s talked about but now that you have it on paper.

Bill: [00:02:13] Well first of all thank you for reading. We think the stuff in it is really really important. What spurred it. Well a couple of things. The first is just you know the trends that we were we’re seeing not only in this profession but in the workforce in general. Speaking specifically about technology trends in technology that we’re seeing. Things like artificial intelligence, robots, machine learning… all of these technologies are kind of ganging up on us at once and you know we’ve had our eyes on it for the last few years but it just seems lately that there’s been a lot of buzz about these things and we’re starting to see things like AI and machine learning actually being implemented around the fringes of the profession. So this stuff isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s not. It’s it’s happening. You know you see things like like IBM Watson being put into into play by folks like H&R Block, for instance, and some others they’re using it for in the audit profession as well so. So these things are here. They’re they’re having a real impact on the profession and they’re doing a lot of the stuff that CPAs have quite frankly been trained to do and have been doing for years and years and years. So you know what happens when more and more of this stuff the accounting and finance professionals have been trained to do and have been doing for years are now being done by machines? What does that mean for for our profession? So that was one that was one thing that we have been watching and I’ve been a little bit concerned about. So the other thing that got us concerned was a report that came out a couple of years ago from CPA.com called Welcome to the fast future. And that report tried to gauge how feature ready this profession was, and what they found was it’s not future ready at all. I mean only 8 percent of the CPAs and accounting and finance pros who are surveyed for that report. Only 8 percent said that they felt the profession was ready and that that really gets us worried. So when you’ve got when you’ve got a kind of that convergence: mass change mass transformation hitting our profession in big ways right now, and the profession itself saying we’re just not ready for it. That said to us we’ve got to do something to help accounting and finance pros get a little become a little bit more future ready. So. So that’s that’s kind of what spurred this on. And our hope is that people will read this and come away with at least the beginnings of a blueprint for how they can start making some changes and become a little bit more future ready.

Peter: [00:04:59] Yeah. When KPMG signed the agreement last March I believe it was with IBM the CEO said something along these lines. Cognitive computing is here in the audit team practice and we’ll be able to analyze many more transactions than we’ve ever been able to do in the past. And that statement alone told me that the auditing function is greatly going to change and if I don’t get this team going out to the sampling process digging through invoices… and also that same thought was for bringing it to a current event with Wells Fargo. AI and Watson was reviewing the transactions in Wells Fargo at the rate that they could, would they have discovered this consumer lending fraud action in a much more rapid way how it ultimately happened? So I I mean there’s a lot of unanswered questions out there but I also hear CPAs basically say the P in CPA stands for procrastination.

Bill: [00:06:07] Hahaha.

Peter: [00:06:07] And I’m not not going to do anything… I take this back to member IFRS?

Bill: [00:06:13] Yes.

Peter: [00:06:14] Incentive for retirement soon as the baby boomers would say. Until something happened they weren’t paying attention to it. And then IFRS went away but we still went ahead with the revenue recognition a new standard. And I’ve still run into people today that still don’t believe it’s real and it’s actually happening.

Bill: [00:06:35] Right. Right.

Peter: [00:06:36] So this is a challenge.

Bill: [00:06:38] It’s a it is a challenge. Tom Hood My boss at the MACPA and and business learning institute. He and I have been out speaking to the accounting and finance pros around the country for a lot of the last year about this topic and generally I get two reactions. One is generally from the from the older folks in the profession who they don’t deny that it’s happening but they don’t think their plan is to ignore it long enough to retire so that they don’t have to worry about it. You know the other reaction that we get is is it quite frankly sheer terror almost. Like they hear about these trends and they’re not prepared for them and they don’t really know what to do next. And our you know our goal is to scare them a little bit but we don’t want him to be terrified about the stuff. You know I mean it’s going to happen whether we like it or, these technological changes. There’s really nothing we can do about it except learn how to do the things that machines can’t do and work with them, and not against them because like I said there’s there’s they’re coming and there’s really nothing that we can do about it except prepare ourselves and learn how to reinvent ourselves a little bit – to go beyond being just number crunchers right and be or like number interpreters; Telling the story behind the numbers doing the things that the machines can’t do.

Peter: [00:08:18] And to your point about telling the story behind the numbers that’s going to be that’s going to be hard but I think they even step beyond that is telling that story… because you allude to it in the white paper about translator, becoming a translator. When I ask CPA if they speak a foreign language and I don’t get a lot of hands up and then I ask them if they speak the foreign language of business called accounting. All these hands go up. It’s a foreign language and we have to learn how to translate that foreign language into plain English. So that’s another challenge on top of that.

Bill: [00:08:54] Yeah absolutely. I mean you know and we know the machines are great. There’s a lot that they can do that we can’t. They can do this stuff. You know this kind of transactional core transactional functions that we’ve been doing for years. They can do it faster, more accurately than we can ever hope to. But they can’t do everything. I mean humans have a decided advantage over the machines in lot of ways. You know the and it comes from just being human. Able to tell those stories right behind the numbers helping our clients and customers become a little bit more future ready as well, which is something that we can do that the machines can’t quite frankly. I think it was there’s a futurist out there by the name of Peter Sheehan – the deep thinker about this stuff – and he says you know we’ve entered an age when we’re humans should only do work that only humans can do.

Peter: [00:09:49] Right.

Bill: [00:09:49] And everything else is going to be automated. And I think that’s that’s really true. So you know that that’s going to require us to kind of rethink how we how we– rethink what we know about learning and about the skills that we possess. I think we’re going to we’re going to have to kind of learn an entirely new set of skills in order to remain relevant going forward. And it’s not the it’s not the technical skills that have gotten us here. I mean you know like I said once that stuff not going to go away overnight, and those technical skills are still make make up of the foundation the core of this profession. They’re still terribly terribly important. But in order to remain relevant going forward, we’re going to have to tack on an entirely new skill set on top of that that’s that’s going to focus more on the human side of business I think.

Peter: [00:10:44] You know we have to have the technical knowledge that that will not go away. And we may not have to crunch the numbers but we have to be able to understand what we’re viewing and become better communicators. The human factor. The empathy aspect of the body language and understanding and making that connection and translating, and you know we tend to call it soft skills and you know people just… But I found the way I got people’s attention about this. Said we may call them soft skills but you know what they’re pretty hard to master.

Bill: [00:11:20] Yeah. Yeah. And Tom is… He’s fond of calling them hard skills. Soft implies that they’re easy. Right. And there’s nothing about this about these things.

Peter: [00:11:37] Yeah.

Bill: [00:11:37] They’re difficult to learn. Let’s define what we’re talking about here. So Tom Tom did some research of his own recently. He took all of the research that we know is out there about what accounting and finance skills we are going to need in order to remain relevant going forward. And there’s a ton of research out there so this came from the AICPA Horizons 2025 project. He looked at a number of books on the on the topic. One is called The Second Machine Age, which laid out exactly what skills we’re going to need in the age of you know machines and machine learning. Humans are Underrated by Geoff Colvin was another book. Only Humans Need Apply by Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby. And then there were some other ones. The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum that that laid out future skills. And then there were a couple reports from the Institute of the future by Marina Garbuz, and finally The 2020 Workplace. So Tom took a look at all of this research that’s been done just recently over the last couple of years and kind of put all of the skills of these different pieces of research focused in on into a matrix to kind of come up with the core eight skills that CPAs are going to need to remain relevant going forward, and what he found was the ones mentioned most frequently by all these different researchers were communications, leadership, Number three was critical thinking and problem solving. The fourth was anticipating and serving evolving needs. Fifth one was synthesizing intelligence to insight; providing the insight to the numbers. What are the numbers telling us? The sixth was integration and collaboration. Seventh was being tech savvy. And he kind of combined data analytics into that one as well. And finally functional and domain expertise. So again those are some of those technical skills that were that we were talking about. But that’s that’s you know seven of those eight skills are are are things that you know you’re your stereotypical accounting and finance pro may not have mastered up to this point. So. So those are the types of things that all of the research that we’re seeing are is telling us are going to be critically important going forward.

Peter: [00:14:14] And the first in the first six that you read were the exact same that came out of the Horizon’s 2025 project that was published 2010 2011, if my memory serves me correctly because I was on council at the time. So Tom created this matrix and was looking… so that the research that was done… so it was published in 2000 10 that research was done 7 8 9 10 more… and we’re in 17. It’s still relevant. The research that was done.

Bill: [00:14:42] Unbelievably relevant I mean it’s that that was the really cool thing about the Horizon’s project. I don’t think most people in the profession grasped at the time: they were trying to make this profession future ready six seven years ago. Right. I mean they they understood what was coming and laid out what exactly we need to do about it. And I think what happens typically is we’re all so busy. The business of just getting through the day stuff that something along that line comes along and we think that that’s kind of interesting or you know interesting stuff coming out of the horizons project but then we get sucked right back into the busy work and just trying to churn through all the stuff on our desk on a day to day basis. We tend to ignore stuff like that until it’s almost too late – until the stuff that is kind of interesting on the horizon suddenly gets closer and closer and is threatening to steamroll us. So now it’s getting to be crunch time and people are saying OK what do I actually need to do about this stuff. So yeah I think that’s where we are today.

Peter: [00:15:55] I’m going to give the profession a shout out here because even before the 2025 project we had the vision project. That was what was the first year going to look like by the year 2011. And that’s once we got closer to 2011 that’s when the horizon project came out. So we’ve been we’ve been trying to be future ready since the early to mid to late 90s.

Bill: [00:16:15] Well here’s here’s something inside of that vision project by the way. That’s where they came up with the the core purpose of the profession. And I tell CBAs what their core purposes every time I’m out talking to them, and very few people have ever heard of this. But in the vision project the core purpose that they designed or developed and this was done at a grassroots level with CPAs throughout the country. The core purpose of the profession is CPAs making sense of a changing and complex world. Now think about that. that are changing in and complex plural that in and this was this was what 99 2000 that vision project came all right.

Peter: [00:16:56] Right.

Bill: [00:16:56] They were thinking about this stuff almost two decades ago. And setting this profession up to succeed as the world transforms into our very eyes. So I think that that is very cool that they were thinking that thinking about this stuff for two decades, and yet here we are. And very few of them have actually done anything about it. So. So that’s that’s the next step. Now we we’ve known for a while what’s coming. In the last couple of years especially we’ve seen it accelerate. Now we got to this is where the rubber meets the road. We actually have to make ourselves a little bit more future ready.

Peter: [00:17:37] I’m in the middle of just in the middle of the book, Steve Jobs’ autobiography. And it’s interesting that when he talks about the early years of developing the process, of developing the computer, and I was thinking about that as I was reading it last night coming coming back from North Carolina and I was like… it wasn’t that long ago. That was what mid mid to late 70s. And we’re 2017 and I get to that exponential doubling approach – it’s blown up since then. But the question I hear is the computer was supposed to make our lives easier but I’m working harder and harder and harder. So what’s going to happen now if we’re having more machines do the work – will I be working even harder?

Bill: [00:18:32] I think in the short term probably the answer will be yes. As you sit down and ramp up your skills that you’re going to need going forward. But ultimately what that’s going to do is help you remain relevant to your clients and customers in ways that the machines never will. Right. So yeah there’s going to be some work that we’re all going to have to do in order to learn these new skills.

Peter: [00:19:06] Mhm.

Bill: [00:19:06] Once we do we’re just going to be that much more well-prepared to do the work that machines can’t do. It’s Yeah I don’t I don’t see us getting less busy, in the short term, and maybe not even in the long term, but I think the work that is going to keep us busy is going to change significantly.

Peter: [00:19:29] So my question to you is how do you take an introverted profession, and I’m using this as a broad brush, and teach them extroverted skills?

Bill: [00:19:47] Yes. Well that’s that’s that’s a good question. I don’t know that they’re you know… in a way I think that that that stereotype the introverted CPA is a bit overblown. I don’t think they’re any more introverted than anybody else. I think they’re a little… like what I think is the big problem is that it’s it’s a it’s a rear facing profession. Right. It’s it’s a it’s a profession that is built on accounting for things that have already happened. Right. We’ve been trained to look in the rearview mirror. And that’s that’s what we’ve done for decades and decades. And now we’re at a point where we have to start looking through the windshield a little bit more and learn how to become more of a forward-facing profession, and figuring out what we need to do to stay relevant tomorrow rather than just accounting for what happened yesterday. Well it’s laid out in the white paper. Basically, I think this there’s there’s five key steps to doing that. Number one is to understand the context of what’s happening. What are the big changes going on around us? And again we’re talking about… There’s really a convergence of what we like to call hard trends things that we know are going to happen. Technological advances is one. Demographics is another. The changing face of the workforce right. Baby Boomers are on their way out. And now you’ve got a brand new generation get ready to enter the workforce with Generation Z. So the workforce itself is shifting, and legislation. Those those those three things – demographics, regulation and technology – are really… They’re kind of converging at a weird time and kind of forming this this almost perfect storm. Right. So understanding what’s going on with those trends is is is the first step. The second one is what we call certainty. Right. What can we be certain about? What are the things that are happening that we know are going to happen? Because what happens is when you start basing your strategy around things that you know are going to happen, as the futurist Dan Burrus would say, you know your odds of succeeding go up and the risk of failing go down. Right. When you start basing your strategy around things that you know are going to happen. As a quick example, we know that the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 10 or X have just been released. We probably We know that there’s probably going to be another one next year that’s going to be even more powerful than the ones this year. So how can we how can we take advantage of that? Right. And this is just a real simple example but there are things going around going on around us every day that we know are going to happen. We know with absolute certainty that technology is going to continue to advance. We know that regulation and legislation is going to continue to come at us faster and in more groundbreaking ways than ever before. We know these trends around demographics are happening. So how can we learn to base our strategies and what we do as organizations around some of those hard trends that we know are going to happen anyway? Right. So so certainly that’s the second key step. Number three is capacity. It’s it’s going to take time for us to learn how to become future ready. And we’re all busier than ever before. We don’t have time. But I’m I’m a big believer in the idea that we make time for the things that are important to us. Right. If watching three hours of TV every night is important you, you’re going to find time to do that. If getting to the gym every day is important to you, you’ll you’ll make time in your schedule, and this stuff… to be future ready, it’s as important as anything you’re going to be able to do. So how do you create some of that time? And then there’s there’s a million. I mean we could spend all day talking about examples like. And again this is a real simple example but we all use Microsoft Word. Right.

Peter: [00:23:57] Yeah.

Bill: [00:23:57] There’s What about 4000 features and functions in word right now? How many of those do you use?

Peter: [00:24:04] Maybe five.

Bill: [00:24:07] And how many did you pay for? You paid for all of them.

Peter: [00:24:10] Right.

Bill: [00:24:11] So I’m again real simple example but I’m guessing that there are some features and functions in there that if you learn how to do it well, would save you some time down the road. And that’s true with every piece of technology that we own. And so you just kind of looking at our processes and understanding how we can build in a little bit of extra time just by doing them in a slightly different way, becoming more efficient and effective, and learning how to build in some spare capacity in our already packed work days is going to be hugely important from the standpoint of becoming future ready. Four is the competencies. We already talked about that. We’re going to have to learn an entirely new set of skills in order to do this stuff. Key among them is anticipation, I think. Again, Dan Burrus talks about this over and over again. The idea that the idea of learning how to spot future trends before they happen and position our organizations to take advantage of them before the competition does. And it’s actually a skill that you can learn. That’s going to be a key competency going forward. And the fifth step is– this is the one that I love. It’s our core purpose, our core values. Right the thing… in a world where everything seems to be changing around us, it’s really kind of comforting to know that there are some things that should never change. And those are our core values… and you know I mentioned the core purpose of this profession before: making sense of a changing and complex world. That should be our goal in everything that we do. Making sense of it for ourselves and then making sense of it for our clients and customers too. And in order to help our clients and customers make sense of the stuff, we’ve got to make sense of that ourselves first right. So so those kind of five steps: context, certainty, capacity, competencies, core values – we call them the five C’s. Those are really what we believe are going to be the keys to to kind of wrapping around our arms around all this change of complexity that we’re dealing with.

Peter: [00:26:13] And I agree with all of that. I’ll just take a step back for a second and ask you about the introverted / extroverted question. An attendee asked me that point, how do you teach an introverted person extroverted skills? I said honestly were not trying to make you extroverted. We’re just trying to hone your communication. You’re communicating with me now. You have your own style of communication. We’re just trying to hone that and make it much more efficient much more pointed, and also have the ability to connect with another person and increase that level of trust and create that level of respect and and then things get done. But also with that social filter, which I think I eased this person’s mind a bit about doing that. But I see that in order for us to do this… and I believe you wrapped up the paper around this is we have to do a little bit every single day.

Bill: [00:27:11] Mm. Yeah.

Peter: [00:27:12] And that took me when I read that piece that took me to that too. Simon Sinek, when he talks about leadership. So you can go take a leadership seminar. That doesn’t make you a leader. You can take what you’ve learned, but you have to apply it every single day to become a leader.

Bill: [00:27:31] Yup.

Peter: [00:27:31] And that’s long along the lines with this. We can’t procrastinate. We are historians.

Bill: [00:27:38] Yeah.

Peter: [00:27:38] We are historians and we need to move away from the history and help create the future, or be that trusted business advisor that we’ve been talking about for years with our clients, customers, external and internal.

Bill: [00:27:58] Now that’s a very good point and a point that Dan Burrus makes consistently is this idea of actually doing some future-focused work on a regular basis to kind of train ourselves to be doing it right. He is. He’s a big fan of saying that the most important app on his phone is his calendar, because if it doesn’t get on the calendar it’s not getting done. So one of his his ideas — and I love this one I’ve actually done it myself. I tell anyone I speak to to do it. Schedule an hour with yourself every week, an appointment with you once a week, where you do nothing but think about the future, In some way shape or form. Read one of the books in your research papers that we’ve been talking about and get informed about what’s going on in the world around us. Learn how to use a new productivity app. Right. I mean talk to talk to your team and ask them what what’s your favorite productivity app. Have them show it to you and show you how to use it. That’s going to help you save some time down the road. That capacity question that we talked about. Think about what’s happening around us and how it’s going to impact the profession, because disruption is most likely going to come from outside of our profession. Right. We’re we’re not going to disrupt ourselves. Most likely it’s probably somebody out there who’s doing something right now that’s going to completely turn our world around. Right. So what might that look like is when it gets here? So you know just just an hour a week to start thinking about these big questions. How am I going to start changing myself and my organization to to take advantage of the changes that we’re seeing? Too often I think you look at this stuff as a problem to be dealt with – something to be scared of. You know new stuff. That’s that’s that’s frightening frightening stuff and change is scary. But you know if we can kind of turn that mindset around and start looking at this stuff as an opportunity, then a whole new world kind of opens up to us. So you know learning to spend a little bit of time on a regular basis thinking about this stuff I think is a great first step to actually doing something about it.

Peter: [00:30:15] Two points there. I love that once a week schedule. Think about it. You reference some of the research and you’ve got all your references in the paper, but I will say that I’ve read The Second Machine Age, I’ve read Humans are Underrated, and I’ve read The Future of the Professions. If I could make a recommendation to the audience, The Second Machine Age… it’s a little tougher because it’s written by two Ph.D. MIT computer scientists and that tends to kind of go… it went over over my head. I even went on a ladder and it still went over my head to read the book. But humans are under-rated and future professions was an easy read. It was pointed. Easier. Easier to consume. Going back to bursts and scheduling things. Bill when we first met I would have ever told you that I would consider myself a writer. I’m not a trained writer. I didn’t I didn’t even like to write you know Christmas cards.

Bill: [00:31:14] Hahah.

Peter: [00:31:14] But I I’ve I’ve published a book and what someone told me a while back was if you want to do something you have to schedule that time, put it on your calendar, and do it. I have on my calendar every morning at 8:00 AM for an hour. Write. I’m in the process of writing my next book about financial storytelling. And I consider myself now much more so than ever before a writer. But it took creating that habit and I’ll be honest with you it hurt at first. It really hurt at first trying to become a writer looking at that– but let’s bring in automation. Dragon dictation. Speech recognition software that you can put on your computer. I use that a lot. Put my head set on and I just talk, and the ability for it to recognize after training that my voice went from maybe three four years ago to about 90 percent. Now it’s about 98 percent. So now I’ve saved myself time by getting it out on the screen by talking through it. Now I go through the excruciating part of editing it, but it’s saving me time. The technology piece.

Bill: [00:32:31] Yeah yeah yeah. I mean that’s the great thing about technology today is that it learns as it goes along. You know and it just makes us that much more efficient. And I think that’s a great example. You talk about how how to build some capacity in there, but you’re dead on with writing. I mean I’ve spent my life as a writer. I was a journalist back in the day before I went to work with the MACPA and it’s never gotten any easier. It’s it’s it’s a it’s a hard hard thing to do. And a little intimidating to look at a blank screen and try to fill it up with words is difficult. But but doing it… The key to doing it is to do it. right? Seth Godin. And this applies beyond just writing, but Seth Godin was talking about blogging. He said if you’re good at it, some people are going to read it. If you’re not good at it and you keep doing it, you get good at it. Right. So that that’s all goes back to practice makes perfect right. And that applies to anything. It applies to becoming future ready, a concept as nebulous as that. Just just getting yourself in the habit of doing something every day or every week it’s going to help you prepare a little bit more for what’s coming in. And by extension help your clients and customers prepare for what’s coming. Just doing it makes you better at it.

Peter: [00:33:59] And I know the MACPA has this anticipatory organization, anticipatory CPA program that’s used because I when I was on vacation in Florida, a gentleman who’s a managing partner of a large regional firm based out of Youngstown, but in Sarasota he and I had breakfast one morning while I was on vacation since I was nearby. And we were talking about the profession, we’re talking about differences are going on. And he said yeah this whole anticipatory organizational — woah woah. Say that again for me. And I went do you Tom Hood? He goes yeah I know that’s who they came up and did the… our managing partner has been on this anticipatory thing for years and you guys came up and he said he absolutely loved the program. It got him thinking completely different. And it was so fresh and so new that everybody was just excited about it and have just taken that ball and run with it.

Bill: [00:35:05] We’ve gotten a lot of people who expressed interest in finding out more about it – how can I become more anticipatory? How can I learn to spot future trends early and take advantage of them? Because they’re starting to understand. That’s really one of the keys to becoming future ready. So it’s it’s just I think it’s a case of the right idea coming along at the right time. Our hope is that more and more folks will will take a look at it because we think it’s a really powerful tool for helping you and others become a little bit more future ready.

Peter: [00:35:40] Yeah. I thoroughly agree and I I hope that my audiences listening to this will pass this episode on to colleagues in the profession. Have them listen to it as well. We will have the white paper in the show notes and on my web site that they can download and grab, and take it – read it, and spend some time thinking about it on how you can start today in the fall of 2017. And what can we do a little bit every single day to become more future ready? And this is a great blueprint to get people to think.

Bill: [00:36:22] Thank you for that. We think it’s important. And our goal is to make the rest of the profession think that it’s important as well because you know in a lot of ways, the future of the profession kind of depends on it.

Peter: [00:36:41] Let me take you down this path because I think one of our challenges as a profession is to be future ready, we need to change the accounting curriculum at universities.

Bill: [00:36:55] We could we could spend like three or four hours talking about education and what needs to be done there… talk about a profession that that isn’t future ready. I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Not just in accounting education, but just in education in general because, in a lot of ways, we’re we’re we’re as you know we’re trying to educate people to become future leaders with tactics that are centuries old. Right. So so yeah I think you’re absolutely right. We do need to take a look at what we’re teaching kids not just and, not just the university but but in high school and even earlier. What things are they really going to need? Seth Godin. Another one. I I keep going back to Seth because he’s just brilliant I believe. But he wrote a book one time. He’s written a number of books that this book was called Indispensable, I believe that might not be the name but I’ll go look that up. But in it, he put he put forth his his idea of what the future of education should look like, and it’s a little radical. He says the only thing that we should be teaching our kids is leadership skills and problems solving, how to solve really hard problems. Everything else they can find online. Right now I think there’s a… I think that’s going a little further out than even I’m prepared do. But the point is yeah I think we need to take a good hard look at how we’re educating folks to become ready for tomorrow because, in a lot of ways, education is still stuck in yesterday.

Peter: [00:38:36] Well, if you think about it, the way the current system is set up when they come out, the responsibility now is to teach them today versus what was taught is now on the employer. The employers will have to invest much more… a lot more money into their employees to get them future ready no matter what profession they go into.

Bill: [00:39:00] Yeah I agree. I think there is that the employers do share a good chunk of responsibility for making sure their teams have the skills that they’re going to need. I think there’s a lot of personal responsibility as well. Myself, as as an employee. This is my career we’re talking about right. My future. So if I’m not getting the skills from my employer, where am I going to get them? And take it upon yourself to get out there and ensure that you know that you’re you’re going to remain relevant going forward as well. So I think responsibility for doing the stuff… I think it lies with everybody quite frankly.

Peter: [00:39:40] And even those who are going to be retiring out of the profession – leave better than when you got it. And don’t turn a blind eye. Invest in the people, give them the skills that they need so they can be successful, and your organization can continue to grow.

Bill: [00:39:59] Yeah believe it or not I’m just now reading Good to Great by Jim Collins. That’s one book that has just escaped me. But he makes a point you know to the leaders of great companies spend more time on the people side of the equation and preparing to turn their organizations over to really talented folks when they lead. Right. It’s all about succession and surrounding yourself with the best people possible. And a lot of that is making sure that they have the skills to continue to grow going forward.

Peter: [00:40:30] I’ve heard that you want to be that you want to be the weakest link amongst your five closest confidants.

Bill: [00:40:40] Yeah. That’s that’s a that’s a great that’s a great analogy.

Peter: [00:40:44] And I’m really good at being the weakest link amongst my 5.

Bill: [00:40:48] I’m brilliant at it. What’s that old saying that you know if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. You want to surround yourself with people who are way smarter than you. And because that’s you know that’s how things get done.

Peter: [00:41:05] Well I was going to close then of you by asking you because I’m always fascinated, What are you reading these days, But you are you alluded to Good to Great, and I still haven’t picked that book up but that’s that should be something I should read. What have you read lately?

Bill: [00:41:22] Well let’s see. I had actually been doing a lot of reading from a series of books from an organization called EOS, which stands for the entrepreneurial operating system, but they’ve got a series of books about you know how you can get more out of your business. And some great tools for how to do that, and so I’ve been reading… one of them is called Traction, which is just a great kind of business book that lays out this system for for getting more out of your business from start to finish. So that was really good. The other one that was almost life changing in a way it was just such a fantastic new book is called Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman, who is he’s also a Pulitzer prize winning columnist for The New York Times, and he spent a lot of time talking about the change and transformation that we’re seeing in the world today not just from things like Moore’s Law which you alluded to earlier. That’s the idea that computing power doubles every every two years or so and that’s what’s what’s leading to all of this transformational change. But he’s also talking about societal changes as well, with things like climate change and how all of these things are kind of dovetailing to make our world really really complex so thank you for being late was was just an eye opening book for me. I highly recommend that.

Peter: [00:42:42] Freidman He was he wrote… was he the one who wrote The World is Flat?

Bill: [00:42:46] Yes.

Peter: [00:42:46] OK. OK. OK. Have you read the book by John Medina called Brain Rules?

Bill: [00:42:53] No no no.

Peter: [00:42:54] You should pick that up and read it. It’s He’s he’s a neuroscientist that actually wrote about the brain book, but put it in a language that we all can understand. And this was introduced to me through a professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University, who was the past president of the National Speakers Association. He came to talk to our chapter and it talks a lot about how… he put in the context of presentations. PowerPoint were more visionary and just gave me some really interesting ideas and thoughts. And I I read that book I was as fast as I’d become fascinated by how the brain works and how the more or less how the audience brain reacts to things that we do, in order to make it easier for them. And then the one that I’m reading now I finally picked up and started reading Steve Jobs autobiography and I’m kind of taking the Steve Jobs approach today. I’m barefoot at work and I haven’t showered today, but that was fascinated me about him. I didn’t realize. I mean he wouldn’t bathe for a week or so.

Bill: [00:43:59] It’s that that kind of mad genius thing going on is. Who was it Einstein who had like seven copies of the same suit. So he wouldn’t have to think about what he was going to wear or something like that. I forget if it was Einstein or somebody else. But yeah you know that’s… I think there’s something to that, that people who change the world don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about fashion you know.

Peter: [00:44:24] Right. Well cool. Well Bill thanks very much for spending time I know that you’re very busy because I heard your slack noise go off in the back.

Bill: [00:44:33] I apologize for that. I had to shut it down.

Peter: [00:44:35] No worries. I’ve been I’ve been introduced to slack from my producer. He likes to communicate with his clients that way. So when I heard that noise. Oh. And you get a lot more slack correspondence I know than I do.

Bill: [00:44:48] And it sometimes can be a little overwhelming and I just every now and then I got to shut it off so I can get some actual work done. But yeah it’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It’s always good to talk to you.

Peter: [00:45:01] Any time. And and I will make this plug. I don’t know the date yet and maybe Bill can share that. But the MACPA is coming out with our own podcast here in the very near future.

Bill: [00:45:14] Yes yes. We are still in the very early stages of planning it. But again it’s going to be kind of focused in on this notion of being… how to become future ready right. And we talked to so many people and heard so many leaders kind of expound on this subject that we thought it would be fun to have conversations with them and share some their ideas for how this profession can kind of move down that road. So look for that hopefully at some point this fall or winter. We will start rolling out.

[music]

Peter: [00:45:50] In episode 73, my guest is Dr. Alan Patterson, who’s the author of the book Leader Evolution: From Technical Expertise to Strategic Leadership, and is one of the business learning institute’s thought leaders.

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