The Offbeat Accountant

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy,  not to fighting the old,  but on building the new.”                                                                                     - Socrates Last week I attended an annual meeting of an association that gathers accounting firms in Miami. This meeting takes part every year, in different continents, and generally we tackle the same topics: compliance, branding, “Big 4”, IFRS, IASB, IFAC, ISA, ISO, and many other letters that struggle to stand up for something with real meaning… However, this year something caught my attention. The future of accountancy as we know it. I have read several blogs and news on the professions of the future, in which none accountancy appeared. We will be infamously replaced...

"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains." -Tennessee Williams. Streetcar Named Desire Shame on me! It`s been like forever since my last post…one post about how we must learn to manage time, and here I am being absorbed by the daily obligations. Of course the first months of the year are the most hectic for almost every accountant in this part of the world, but that´s no excuse to forget to improve other areas of our life, such as entertainment, sports, reading, learning, traveling and so on. Last week, the one that will remain in history as “the-week-everybody-went-crazy-with-Pokemon”, something unusual happened at the office. One of the guys, just activated an “incense” in the application and shouted “hey guys, get your phones ready, Pokémons are coming”. And during half an hour more than 20 different creatures (mostly repeated) started popping up (virtually) in every ...

Real Knowledge is to know the extent of one´s ignorance Confucius Last week I was perusing Facebook, as I sometimes do when I have some minutes free – more always than sometimes, to be true. I came across with a very interesting image of three clocks, one next to each other. They compared the pace of three different aspects of every day: Time, information and Knowledge Time: the clock hands moved at a regular pace, about 5 seconds to give a full turn. Information: the hands were like crazy, about 20 times the speed of the “time clock” Knowledge: the hands were stuck in number 6, like defeated. They tried to go up, but keep coming back to the 6. I tried to find this gif image again, but I was unable to find it, in spite of googling it by using all the combination of words possible, and rummaging through all my contacts of Facebook. That’s the problem with this amount of information. You can never find it when you really need it. So let`s try to make my poin...