What do all of these people have in common?

These guys all make a living through establishing rapport (trust), listening, and through their skillful use of questions while interviewing.

Think Like a Reporter

As a business professional, whether you’re in accounting & finance, sales, marketing, or IT, you need good information about your environment.  Some of the best information tends to be locked up in the head’s of all the people you work and interact with through the normal course of your day.

Why not try “interviewing” your colleagues?

I’m talking about anything from stuff about business process to procedural and administrative workflows, operations design, and business and financial report requirements. Pick a topic and ask questions on it.

The opportunity exists to understand all the systems operating around you better when you start thinking like a reporter and asking good questions.

Let’s be clear.  I’m NOT talking about badgering, browbeating, hectoring, pressing feet to the fire, inquisition style questioning that’s designed to embarrass or belittle your colleagues.

So, what makes a good reporter?

I’ll go into a few pointers and some media, but I would also encourage all of you to watch the CBC’s Amanda Lang interview some people.  In my view, she is far and away the best question-asker in media right now.  She’s a great example of doing all the right things through the course of an interview to engender trust of both the interviewee and the audience as well as to ask insightful questions that allow for detailed answers.

The Role of a Reporter

Mathew Ingram, formerly a technology reporter with Globe & Mail and now blogger with GigaOM, sums up the job of a traditional reporter beautifully in his recent TEDx Toronto talk, Five Ways New Media Will Save Old Media, as:

“we called people up and asked them irritating questions and then wrote down what they said”

Whoops! Sorry, wrong clip.  Do we have the right clip?  Do we have a clip?

Ah, okay, what he said was,:

“If you’re writing about a story, somewhere someone out there knows more about that story than you.  In fact, a lot of people might know more about that story than you.  So, you should allow them to tell you what they know.”

This is the essence of reporting.

Now, when he said this, he was actually talking about having newspapers incorporate comments and input from readers into the process of journalism and not specifically about interview etiquette.  But, in the New Media world there’s less and less difference between the audience and the subject.  Here’s Mathew’s TED talk where he describes this evolution:

I think Mathew makes a good point as well in recognizing the importance of having a dialogue going.  In “traditional” reporting, there may have been the perception of a one-way exchange.  The reporter asks, the subject answers.  That’s only half the story.  It’s a conversation and like any good conversation it’s a two-way street. But, it’s a conversation with purpose.  You are the guide.

Simple Tips

Broaden your sources

Think about this question: Where do we get our information?  Bob Woodward, one of the journalists that brought down Nixon in the Watergate Scandal, tells us in the following clip that we get information 1) from people 2) from documents (or evidence) and 3) from the scene (observation).

He make a great point about talking to people.  He says, talk to A BUNCH of people.  Not just one person.  In a day, he may talk to a dozen people around the same issue in order to gain that broad perspective of views.

Asking Questions

Basic journalism tells us to focus on the Five Ws (that isn’t really 5… or just Ws, okay, so don’t use Journo’s for calc’ing your Net Profit):

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened?
• When? When did it take place?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

Of course, all questions are not created equal.  Journalism 101 blog lays out some ground rules about the soft skills, but suffice to say I don’t think you want to make people feel stupid.

In general, keep an open mind and ask open-ended questions.  Keep that question engine going in your mind so you can delve more deeply as opportunities present themselves.  LISTEN, so you can key off of what the subject is telling you.

Remember, you are questioning yourself during this process as well.  All of those assumptions you may have embedded in your thinking need to be questioned throughout this process.

Say Thank You!

and, of course,

Be Prepared

‘Nuff said!

Here’s some additional resources that should help you build up your skills.

Media Training Basics: Mastering Tough Questions from the Media by Harvard Business Service

How To Ask Better Questions by Judith Ross at Harvard Business Review

Learn To Ask Better Questions by John Baldoni at Harvard Business Review

The Four Principles of Interviewing by Columbia University

From Chapter 13 of Sun Tzu’s famous, Art of War, on the use of spies:

“The means by which enlightened Rulers and sagacious Generals moved and conquered others, that their achievements surpassed the masses, was advance knowledge.”

“Advance knowledge cannot be gained from ghosts and spirits, inferred from phenomena, or projected from the measures of heaven.  But must be gained from men.”

Added Bonus

Sun Tzu’s Five Types of Spies

1. Local Spy

2. Internal Spy

3. Turned Spy

4. Dead Spy

5. The Living Spy

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Understanding Business is a Game of Questions
2. The Meaningful Scorecard
3. Improving Your Month-end Throughput

As George Akerlof and Robert Shiller discuss in their widely acclaimed book, Animal Spirits (How Human Psychology Drives The Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism),

“The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives, of sequences of events with an internal logic and dynamic that appear as a unified whole.  In turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework for motivation.  Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories…. Great leaders are first and foremost creators of stories.”

Think about the stories that define your life.  How do these stories influence your perspective?  How do they influence how you see yourself?  What are the stories that resonate most strongly in your life?  What stories do you choose to relate to other people?  There’s a growing body of knowledge, that aligns with the passage above, saying these stories are fundamental to the formation of our identities.  This is a powerful thought.

Yet, traditionally in accounting and finance, stories are an afterthought.  We are taught to focus on the numbers.  We create the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement in accordance with GAAP, leaving storytelling to the sales and marketing departments.  My experience has been that it’s very difficult to generate engagement through the use of the financial reports, and in retrospect, I think it’s for this reason.

There’s a reason why people say the Notes To The Financial Statements will tell you “where the bodies are buried”.  The reason is that only in The Notes do we find stories.

From a regulatory perspective, for external reporting we’re fairly hog-tied as to what we can do.  GAAP is king.  These constraints are institutionalized and provide a structural grounding for capital markets that is required for a host of reasons.

Internal reports, on the other hand, present a tremendous opportunity to begin using stories to provide context and colour to business results.  This is the area of accounting and finance where we can really affect some change NOW by bringing life to the numbers.

In the following clip, Ira Glass (son of an accountant and award winning host of This American Life on Chicago Public Radio) describes using anecdotes to convey ideas and says,

“the power of the anecdote is so great, no matter how boring the material is, if it’s in a story form where there’s an anecdote happening,  it has a momentum in and of itself… like being on a train that has a destination”

(hat tip to Presentation Zen blog for a good post on this same clip)

Ira Glass summarizes the process of telling a story as:

1. Start with an action

2. Raise a question from the beginning (the bait)

3. Answer the question

4. Repeat

5. Moment of Reflection (the “why”)

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Running the gauntlet of Year End Business Reporting
2. Accounting for I.T. in the Finance Department
3. Improving Your Month-end Throughput

The notion of intelligence is…  “the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal.”

- Hans Peter Luhn, IBM Journal, October 1958

The above quote is generally credited with coining the term Business Intelligence (B.I.).  Luhn’s vision was ambitious for his time and it’s still ambitious today.  How much of the following article do you find relevant right NOW with respect to your business reporting challenges?

The following are direct quotes from the IBM Journal Article, “A Business Intelligence System” published 1958 with my commentary added:

Information is now being generated and utilized at an ever-increasing rate because of the accelerated pace and scope of human activities and the steady rise in the average level of education. At the same time the growth of organizations and increased specialization and divisionalization have created new barriers to the flow of information. There is also a growing need for more prompt decisions at levels of responsibility far below those customary in the past. Undoubtedly the most formidable communications problem is the sheer bulk of information that has to be dealt with. In view of the present growth trends, automation appears to offer the most efficient methods for retrieval and dissemination of this information.

With respect to the volumes of data being created in 1958, I think we can safely say, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Keep in mind that 1958 was really the primordial soup of computing and information management.  At that time, the Integrated Circuit had just been developed which would pave the way for development of computing as we know it today.  Looking back on IT in 1958, I’m thinking it consisted of a “series of tubes”.

Luhn continues:

Ideally, an automatic system is needed which can accept information in its original form, disseminate the data promptly to the proper places and furnish information on demand.

So, in 1958, the concept of “on-demand” is also christened.  A blog I follow called, Only Dead Fish, by Neil Perkins references the Greek term, Kairos, recently when discussing the importance of context.  Kairos refers to, “the right or opportune moment” or “the supreme moment”.  I think this is the best way to think about the basic need/want underpinning the concept of on-demand.  I think this is how Luhn was thinking about it too:

One of the most crucial problems in communication is that of channeling a given item of information to those who need to know it. Present methods of accomplishing this are inadequate and the general practice is to disseminate information rather broadly to be on the safe side. Since this method tends to swamp the recipients with paper, the probability of not communicating at all becomes great.

Of course, we have come to know this “general swamping” in terms of email as opposed to paper, but it’s interesting that the problem remains the same.  How often are you required to spam the inboxes of your co-workers with reams of reports that may or may not be relevant to what they are currently thinking about?

Luhn actually advocates the creation of Profiles that would reflect the person’s sphere of interest!  This guy was truly visionary!  He goes on to discuss what he describes as “the Library problem” referring to the process by which users retrieve information from the system.  I really like this term and think we should resurrect it here and now!  Call me, The Librarian!

These Librarians that Luhn describes will become the guys who are your Systems Administrators and Database Administrators today.  In Luhn’s world, these are the guys who would eliminate the need to train the end users of the information in navigating the complexities of the system.  Although, later he does offer a tantalizing glimpse into an ever greater vision of technological advancement:

Although the service of a librarian is considered a convenience to the action point, in certain cases, means may be provided at the action-point location to permit direct access to the system. This would be justified where many of the inquiries concern lookup-type retrieval of data.

Otherwise, the system he envisions does actually begin to characterize what’s become the classic IT problem when it comes to report generation.  That process being:

1. Information user requests a report from IT
2. IT evaluates the request and, time permitting, creates the report for the user
3. User receives the report and discovers that it doesn’t quite fit the need
4. A new request goes to IT
5. Repeat (ad nauseum)

In 1958 though, this was a revolutionary breakthrough in organizational management!  Perhaps it’s time to look for the next breakthrough, after all, it’s been 50 years.  The article goes on to detail the process of capturing and organizing information including the EVENTUAL DESTRUCTION of the data!  Microfilm, magnetic tape, punchcards, these are the modes of storage being considered.  At the same time, the functional technology being envisioned is virtually StarTrekkian:

The magnetic tape record is now introduced into the auto-abstracting and encoding device. This device submits the document to a statistical analysis based on the physical properties of the text, and data are derived on word frequency and distribution.

A relative value of sentence significance is then established by a formula which reflects the number of significant words contained in a sentence and the proximity of these words to each other within this sentence. Several sentences which rank highest in value of significance are then extracted from the text to constitute the auto-abstract.

Whoops, I think we may have also just inadvertently discovered the origin of vaporware.  The article does admit that the functionality being described is only a vision and that “the question arises as to how far away such systems may be from realization”.  The fact is that some of what has been envisioned has only recently been achieved.  Think about tagging, creating profiles, digital indexing, and keyword searches.  What makes me think this article figures prominently in the lives of both Larry Page and Sergey Brin?

Dissemination of the new information occurs based on the user-generated profiles.  This feature is, again, only recently been substantively achieved.  The means of dissemination according to the article? The use of personal printers!  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  I still know companies where the primary means of report distribution is the printed page.  I encourage you to print out page 4 of this article and overlay the copy onto your organization’s business process information flowchart.  Similarities?

Okay.  Just a few more quotes here to round things off, but you can peruse the embedded document for the full story:

In the process of transacting business it is often desired to determine who concerns himself with a given subject. The usual type of question asked is: “Who does or knows a certain thing?” A function of the Business Intelligence System is to answer questions of this type.

Perhaps the techniques which ultimately find greatest use will bear little resemblance to those now visualized, but some form of automation will ultimately provide an effective answer to business intelligence problems.

Indeed.

Enjoy.

IBM Biz Intel 1958

Related posts:

1. Business Intelligence class needs a makeover
2. Business Intelligence Adds a Dimension to Your Strategy
3. Mind Your Own Business Intelligence (I Stole this Title!)

“Buy the ticket, take the ride” – Hunter S. Thompson

Now, this isn’t a critique of the inevitable conflicts (real and perceived) inherent between these various groups.  Nor is it a post about the differences between Accounting and Marketing.  In order to do that, I am missing one critical piece.  My good friend Dan’s “Top Ten Differences between Accounting and Marketing List“.  Maybe with your help, readers, we can convince him to give it up.  Add your thoughts in the comments section!

NO.  This post is about posing a simple question:

How are your Year End spreadsheets doing?

Year End is upon us!  Everyone knows, thanks to these accounting blogs:

• Look at Last Year’s File
• Accounting Nation
• Accounting WEB
• CPA Trendlines
• re: The Auditors
• Junior Deputy Accountant (warning: Language)
• and Going Concern

Everyone knows that Audit Professionals have been raked over the coals of more stringent regulation and oversight the past few years (for all the good it’s done!).  And, if my experience is at all representative of our collective experience on the industry side, the auditors have been passing all of that regulation onto you!

Preferred method of passing = The Paddle

The paddle will be heading your way again soon enough.  Time to rollover all those Year End files and clean up for prepping 2009’s close.  The rigors of financial reporting compliance are staring us right in the face once again.  Oh, and Merry Christmas by the way.

Of course, I think that if the past 2 year’s have taught us anything, it’s that regulation is ineffective in preventing fraud.  I would like to know where Frank Abagnale jr. stands on this issue.  Abagnale is the character upon which the movie Catch Me If You Can is based and for the past 35 years he’s been helping the FBI, businesses, and government cope with matters of fraudulent activity.  I highly recommend his book, Art of The Steal, for anyone interested in learning more about specific industry-related fraud risk.

Ultimately, prevention is the key; and if that’s true, historical financial reports will never fulfill that role.  I realize that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but my view is that (anecdotally) auditors are getting hung up on details that bear little or no relation to the real risks.  Reason has been traded for checklists.

Be that as it may, you guys are still going to be toiling over this stuff, at their mercy, in the very near future.  At the same time, you will be expected by your management team to provide ACTUAL insight into the ACTUAL operations of your ACTUAL business.

Operations.  This is where the rubber meets the road.  Here is where you can’t “juke the stats“.  Yet, due to the pressures around the financial reports (case in point above), our operations reports are given second billing (if that – after payroll, A/R and collections, admin, etc).  To give you an idea of how much they are marginalized, there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for Operations Reports!

I don’t see the issue with the auditors changing or going away anytime soon.  For me, there’s no reason to be optimistic or to engender optimism in you regarding that!  This is the system we live with for the moment.

Operations Reporting has to find a way to fit within the time constraints given these other pressures.  Either it fits in by 1) doing less or 2) doing more in less time.  How would you prefer to deal with your Operations Reports?

Do you have questions about the difference between Financial Reports and Operations Reports?  What are your views with respect to how this all fits together?  Let us know in the comments (and don’t worry, no salesperson will visit you).

When you talk about the true viability of the business, what does it really mean?

Closing links:

• Here’s a great segment talking about why we should question Ratings Agencies
• Embedded copy of IDCs Predictions for 2010

Enjoy!

Top 10 IT Predictions for 2010

Related posts:

1. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job
2. The Roots of Business Reporting Technology
3. The Importance of Stories

At the time, I replied,

“Well if that’s the case, if Sales are the waitresses of the business, than Accountants are the dishwashers.”

I was Controller at the time.

You might think the worst aspect of washing dishes, I’m talking commercially here, is the fact you are cleaning up other people’s messes.  I don’t think it is.  I think the worst part is mind-numbing repetition.

Welcome to hell. Population: You

As Guy Forsyth (singer/actor) famously says in the movie, Waking Life:

“Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize… that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.”

That kind of repetitious work.

If, by the end of preparing your report, you find yourself never wanting to set eyes upon the thing again, you’re a dishwasher my friend.

One job I had, I was actually “trained“ to print off a paper copy of a report from our accounting system in order to then physically key punch the numbers into, not one, but 2 excel spreadsheets.  Every. Single. Month.  This wasn’t twenty years ago, this was 3 years ago.

That was a dishwasher moment for me.  Does my report have insight and analysis?  Does it tell the story of the business?  WHO CARES!!!!  I want this report out of my sight!

Now, I know I’m not supposed to tell you to buy our product.  I know that.  PT Barnum must be spinning in his grave with the rise of the “don’t be salesy” philosophy – particularly prevalent in social media circles.  It was the style at the times… is what we’ll say looking back years from now.  PT Barnum was, of course, one of the greatest self-promoters of all times.  He famously said, “Without promotion something terrible happens… Nothing!”.  He also said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”.

So, this is me not selling saying, we can show you how to get rid of your dishwasher jobs.  A few walkthroughs over the phone with our guys to get you set up and your dishwashing days are over.  At least, with respect to certain repetitious report creation tasks.  When you can’t get the report you need without putting in some serious dishwashing time and think, “there must be a way” then you’re likely in a position where a call with us could help you.

As PT Barnum also famously said,

“Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done.”

Now, this is a Friday post, so in the tradition of Fun Friday check out these clips once the office has cleared out.  The first is easily the best dishwasher quit scene ever made from a little known animated classic called American Pop.  The second is a clip from the aforementioned Waking Life; another classic (non-dishwashing related).

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Running the gauntlet of Year End Business Reporting
2. The Roots of Business Reporting Technology
3. Quarter End Reporting – A Time for Reflection

I was contemplating something like:

• Confessions of an Excel Jockey
• Fathers of Invention; The Mother of All Spreadsheets
• or Ghosts of Spreadsheets Past

What is difficult, complex, or nuanced about that?

What I found, as I started digging into a bit of cursory research (what is a blog post without links?), was that the debate about the relative value of spreadsheets has been raging with a fair bit of intensity for some time.  It wasn’t long before I had compiled literally pages of links that espoused support for or against their use.  There’s a term out there describing the exponential growth in the number of spreadsheets in a company as “spreadmarting”.  Well, my links on the spreadsheet question were spreadmarting!

My web journey ran the spectrum of views!  There are those that dig excel to the point of self-applying a moniker like “Mr.Excel”; and on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have an actual institute dedicated to studying the dangers inherent in spreadsheet use.  There are web pages dedicated to compiling links to other excel resources [I randomly chose one here], and articles detailing some of the greatest business blunders attributed to spreadsheet errors.  If you feel you may have a spreadsheet problem, for the small fee of $1749 Forrester Research will provide you with a white paper (complete with a money-back guarantee) that promises to explain spreadsheet best practice for you – let’s assume it’s really great.  Or for the more frugal-minded, there’s Truth To Power’s practical Top Ten list.

Games have been developed based on excel in case you don’t get quite enough during the course of your work day (actually, I highly recommend this one!).  There are even spreadsheets designed to compare other spreadsheets.  Surprisingly, excel formulae only made it to #4 on the “Stuff Accountants Like” blog (#1 is Not Sleeping – sadly, the blog itself has recently gone to sleep).  And since I don’t want to leave out the rest of the blogosphere, here is a link to a list of other excel-related blogs.

What all of this tells me is that the role of spreadsheets in organizations is up for debate.

With that in mind, I encourage you to weigh in.  What is the role of spreadsheets in your organization?  How do you feel about it?  What are your best (and worst) “Excel moments”?

Regardless, there is little doubt about one thing.  The business world, collectively, relies heavily on this little piece of technology that grew out of Dan Bricklin’s need 30 years ago for a souped up calculator when he and Bob Frankston came up with Visicalc.  So, although I haven’t made much headway in relating Indicee to our good friend the spreadsheet just yet, hopefully this post will get you thinking more actively about this ubiquitous business tool.  We can tackle the Indicee connection soon enough as I plan to revisit this topic regularly.

We are Spreadsheet Nation!

Related posts:

1. Quarter End Reporting – A Time for Reflection
2. Business Reporting ≠ Dishwasher Job
3. Defining Business Intelligence