People: Professor Alan Jagolinzer
Judge Business School at Cambridge

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Peter Burgess

Linkedin Invitation message Alan Jagolinzer

I came up to Sidney Sussex in 1958 and read engineering then economics. Later articled with Cooper Brothers (now PwC). 2 decades corporate work, then intl work on socio-enviro-economic development issues. Post career working to enhance accountancy for the 21st century ... TBL and ALL the CAPITALS.

Alan Jagolinzer is now a connection
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Gmail Peter Burgess I am looking forward to your New York visit 1 message Peter Burgess Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 10:23 AM To: a.jagolinzer@jbs.cam.ac.uk Bcc: Claudia Freed Dear Professor Alan Jagolinzer

Thank you for accepting a Linkedin connection ... it is much appreciated. I came up to Sidney Sussex in 1958 and read engineering then economics. Later articled with Cooper Brothers (now PwC). 2 decades corporate work, then intl work on socio-enviro-economic development issues. Post career working to enhance accountancy for the 21st century ... TBL and ALL the CAPITALS. I think it is fair to say that Cambridge was one of the best things that happened in my life ... though I probably have not used the connection as aggressively as I could have and probably should have. I read engineering because I was always fascinated by the amazing things that had been created during the course of the industrial revolution. A the time engineering was quite mathematical and the undergraduate tripos covered all types of engineering and not any one speciality. When it came to choosing a speciality for post graduate work I opted for economics, another discipline (??) with a broad reach. After engineering, the sloppiness of economic numbering, came as something of a shock ... but the broad concepts of how the socio-enviro-economic system works were fascinating. After Cambridge I joined the Davy Ashmore Group as a Management Trainee. This was a company engaged in heavy engineering that was designing and building steel mill equipment with projects around the planet (Australia, India, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden to name a few, not to mention England, Scotland and Wales!) It soon became apparent to me that 'management' was driven by accounting more than by engineering, and that I needed to get that skill set sooner rather than later. A year into this program, I articled with Cooper Brothers in London and three years later qualified as a Chartered Accountant. I think it was the first year university graduates had the opportunity to qualify after 3 years of articles rather than 5. Because of my engineering background, my principal was Brian Maynard, who was head of the Cooper's consultancy practice, and my training landed me in the middle of one interesting situation after another. I recall trying to figure out how to account for a blast furnace at a subsidiary of the Stewarts and Lloyds steel company that had 'gone out' and all the molten iron had frozen inside the furnace into one huge solid lump! I also recall being part of an audit team doing the audit of one of the first electronic computers to be used for the preparation of company accounts ... the computer was home made by EMI and was being used by EMI Records for its accounting. EMI Records was manufacturing Beatles Records at the time and the inventory control was on this computer. I was given the job of validating the engineering logic that was the basis for all of this. It seems that the same issues we were addressing at that time still are in play as more and more of the world's decisions are being made by some form of computer logic! Fast forward, in 1966 I became an economic migrant to the United States ... earning more in a month in the USA at that time than I could earn in a year in the UK. After the wage flatlining of the last 40+ years this is no longer possible ... and, together with the related inequality, has become a a huge problem that business and political leadership has ignored for a very long time. For about 20 years I had a focus on corporate performance and became a very young CFO. My aim was to improve profit performance very fast by doing practical things that improved efficiency and moved the profit needle. I did not do financial engineering, but I learned a lot about how data flows need to be designed to enable decision making, and specifically how more appropriate feedback speed is more important than more precision from more data. In my view data should be enabling understanding more than anything else!. My last corporate job as the CFO of an international shrimp fishing company was also a game changer because I started to appreciate the scale of global socio-economic dysfunction. We operated in more than 26 jurisdictions around the world, and often in places a long way from modern infrastructure. It was my first exposure to dead people ... cause of death ... international economics! At this point I became an independent consultant ... in retrospect, perhaps not the best financial decision I ever made ... but certainly one that has given me an interesting life. Getting good consulting work in the USA proved pretty much impossible ... but I did get interesting work internationally, including doing work for the World Bank and the United Nations. Eventually I did assignments in more than 50 countries, and gained some perspective on both geography and geopolitics. While some of my work had some pretty good results, much of my work was not well received. As an accountant, I am better than most at 'following the money' and this gave me a lot of insight into the bribery and corruption that is endemic in the modern global economy. I made the mistake of asking not only who was getting the money, but who were writing the checks. This question was 'off limits' and more and more I became unwelcome as an international consultant / expert ... and then aged out of the field. I have used numbers to manage in the corporate world and to a significant extent also in the humanitarian assistance and development arena ... and am passionate about the genius of the accounting classification of accounts between balance sheet accounts and profit and loss accounts. The idea that the change in the balance sheet from the beginning to end of a period is the same as the profit for the period is very powerful. Apply this idea to the Triple Bottom Line (People / Profit / Planet) and ALL the capitals (Social Capital / Natural Capital / Economic Capital) and highly profitable polluting companies do not appear quite so good. I would like to see the same framing of progress and performance for ALL the activities in the socio-enviro-economic system and for ALL the actors in the system. Putting together a numbering system to enable all of this at very low cost is something of a challenge, but electronic data processing is probably several million times more powerful today than it was when I finished my education! I am looking forward to your visit to CAM (Cambridge in America) next week. I decided to write this rather long message rather than trying to talk to you about it in New York. Your agenda in New York is not going to have much focus on any of this ... and I understand that ... but at the same time, I believe that the sort of enhanced accountancy that I am thinking about is going to be important for the future of the accountancy profession, but more important, for the future of the world. With Best Regards PeterB _____________________________ Peter Burgess ... Founder and CEO TrueValueMetrics ... Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society True Value Impact Accounting ... Multi Dimension for ALL the Capitals http://www.truevaluemetrics.org LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/peterburgess1/ Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/PeterBurgess2/ Twitter: @truevaluemetric @peterbnyc Telephone: 570 202 1739 Email: peterbnyc@gmail.com Skype: peterbinbushkill