David ... I am a long time past my 'sell by date' but continue to have a deep interest in the performance of our global socio-enviro-economic system.
I am looking to get a bit or even a lot more active around the future of accountancy and the management of the socio-enviro-economic system. My impression is that the modern corporate accountant and the accountancy profession in general is not embracing social issues and environmental issues in a meaningful way.
I see the accountancy profession doing everything it can that enables corporate profit maximization no matter what the impact on everything else.
I qualified as a CA in 1965 after some industrial management training in Sheffield heavy engineering and after university training in engineering and then economics. 60 years later I am struck by what has stayed the same and what needs to change in order to make sense of the modern world and to manage it in the best possible way!
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David
I enjoyed the CAW Fordham event last year but was a little disturbed by my overall 'takeaway' which was that that the accountancy procession was deeply complicit in the core issues of our global society, not so much by commission but by omission.
I plan on attending this year's Fordham event ... health permitting.
As you know, I did my articles with Cooper Brothers & Co in London qualifying in 1965. Prior to that my foundatonal education was engineering and subsequent to that economics ... essentially a double major in two very different disciplines. After that I participated in a management training program with a heavy engineering company in Sheffield (Davy United) which was manufacturing equipment for the steel industry all over the world ... and going out of business in the process because its management systems were archaic. The company's CFO suggested that maybe I should think about training as a Chartered Accountant and the rest is history.
However, 60+ years later I feel that the accountancy profession may be in somewhat the same situation as Davy United ... no longer fit for purpose because the world has moved on while accountancy has not.
But it is worse than that! When you look at the progress and performance of the overall global socio-enviro-economic system over my adult life-time it has not been uniformly good but pretty awful.
Technical progress has been impressive in many fields ... aircraft and aero-engines; materials; data processing; digital communication, medical science; rail transportation; civil engineering ... and yes, military engineering!
Broadly speaking, the business world has embraced technical progress ... invested in it ... to improve productivity with some impressive results. As I write this, the New York Stock Exchange is reporting record highs so something has to be going right ... or is it?
To a great extent, the leaders of the business world have chosen to put stockholders (owners) ahead of all the other stakeholders. While business productivity has improved over time, the world has not become a better place.
I think it was the young leader of Bhutan that wanted his country to improve the happiness of the people ... a metric referred to as Gross National Happiness. Using this metric the performance of most countries during the past several decades has been awful!
What needs to change in order to have a world where people are a whole lot happier and happiness is increasing rather than going extinct.
In my management experience, the reality is that people pay attention to easy simple timely meaningful metrics ... and people want agency.
I have observed over the years that playing rugby footbal at a fairly high level as a schoolboy taught me a lot more about effective management and teamwork than simply getting lectured or reading a book.
During my own early career, I worked to improve business profit performance with considerable success. For several years I was the CFO of a US based company engaged in the seafood business in about 20 jurisdictions around the world.
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