beBetter 

This blog is a fable that hopefully provides a humorous look into how distractions and interruptions can be very painful due to lost time and opportunities. Since I have recently shared some humor from my brother Mike’s storytelling, we will use his medical practice for today’s fable.

I am working diligently to keep my weight at 195 pounds. As part of my early morning ritual, I weigh and record my weight almost every morning. Yes, I write it down because it creates more accountability as I reflect on my track record daily and keeps me focused on my goal.

We are 20 months into living in our new home and the outside fans still do not work. The tire service company can’t sell me three new tires because they are counting them for inventory. I’m in a meeting and find out 30% of the team is struggling to get a critical app to work on their phones. Worse, team members are accepting slow system performance as the “norm.” We all have these experiences and stories where no one takes ownership, no one gets it done. The sad part is that people give up hope for a better outcome and start accepting CRAP excuses.

As I pulled up the driveway, I knew Cece was in her element. She was muddy from head to toe and plants, flowers, water hoses and clippers were scattered everywhere. She got her love of gardening from her late father, Poppy.

As I walked up to hear the latest gardening updates, she had the clippers whirling on the rose bushes. “Cece, aren’t you being a little aggressive with those clippers?” I asked. She replied, “Poppy always said to have the prettiest roses, you have to prune them as they produce more blooms than the individual plant can support.” I must admit, Poppy had some beautiful rose gardens although I’m not sure he enjoyed the pruning as much as Cece, but I kept that thought to myself.

I was really excited about my schedule as I headed into the office for the day. I had two meetings with team members—one to collaborate on a new client opportunity and the other to develop a strategy to help us execute at a faster pace on changing our client experience to be more focused, anticipatory and consistent.

I frantically looked for the hair dryer as I was already 15 minutes late to meet our team to prepare for an important presentation that morning. As I turned the place upside down, I thought—I know this nice resort provides a hair dryer in every room. Now it only takes me about 60 seconds to “style” my hair, but it does better when blow-dried.

After looking in all of the usual places in the bathroom, I continued my search in the closet and then to the rest of the room. Having exhausted all known possibilities, I picked up the phone and hit the button for housekeeping.

As the summer progressed, I felt myself losing some steam—my energy was too low. As I reflect on it now, I was having a few stomach aches along the way. Oddly enough, when I felt some abdominal pain, I would eat more. Sounds backward but I have always tried to eat my way through feeling bad. CeCe laughs at this every time and has been known to call me an idiot for doing so. (Please, no comments. I realize it might not be the best strategy.) So I am rocking along, eating my way through the pain, until my abdominal pain increased to the point that one Sunday evening I found myself curled up on our floor trying to ease the pain. That night I became violently ill. Thinking it was just food poisoning, I worked from home a day and then returned to work. But I knew something was wrong when I still felt weak and experienced the same abdominal pains.

Recently, I was fortunate to participate in an intense brainstorming session on the future of our profession with six other top 100 CPA managing partners. One of the hot topics was the very evident need for our profession to provide more advisory insights and services to our clients. With oncoming automation around data input and analysis, we know our services need to evolve into more advisory type services. We discussed that our "trusted advisor" status is anchored too closely to compliance, transactional and historical type services. Primarily, we have been a very responsive profession where few have consistently served as proactive strategic advisors.

Innovation is a key to our future success, and we can build a culture of innovation within our own teams. This 3-part series explores what it means to build a truly innovative culture at your business or firm. Make sure to read Choosing to be Open Minded, Part 1 of Building a Culture of Innovation, and Culture Leads Innovation, which is Part 2 of Building a Culture of Innovation to understand the entire journey.

Recently, when Tom Hood addressed our partners at our annual partner retreat, he helped us understand what type of leadership is required today when we are faced with such a disruptive rapid transformation. Today, every organization must be innovative and must have an incredible commitment to learning in order to remain relevant. Someone said, “survival is not mandatory.” And unless we become extremely focused as leaders, we will miss an amazing opportunity for growth. This rapid transformation brings an abundance of opportunities to leaders and firms that are focused. It also means that everyone leads, but our top leadership must be intensely focused. 

I think the busy we each feel today primarily comes from our legacy of treating everything as being urgent. We have bought into the legacy thinking that if it is urgent, it is important to our future. We have bought into the legacy thinking that to be responsive we must treat everything as urgent. We have bought into the legacy thinking that if we are working on urgent things, we are important and valued. We have bought into the legacy thinking that learning to handle urgent things is a competency that makes us feel good. 

It is so tempting (obviously too tempting for CPA firms) to be everything to everybody. CPA firms wear the badge of never saying, “NO.”  No wonder we constantly hear the warning that someone can’t see a real distinction between most firms.

Recently, a partner sent me an email noting that I often write about busyness and how important it is that we focus on our highest priorities. He went on to say, "have you thought about how close busyness is to business—one letter!" I had not and as I have thought about this, I can’t get it off my mind. 

This blog is the first in the series, My Top 10 Blunders and How You Can Avoid Them.

As I reflect on my career, I must admit it did not take me long to note many more than 10 blunders. For my sanity, I have decided to share only what might be the top 10 in this blog series. I wouldn’t say this first blunder was the biggest but it certainly felt like the right place to start. It certainly ranks in the top five.