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How are you feeling
Richard Brewin • Apr 03, 2024
I wonder if there are any other trades or professions that are as ‘glass half full or half empty’ as accountancy?
I spend much of my time digesting the thoughts of people in and around the world of accountants and bookkeepers. I come across lots about what we are apparently getting wrong, less so about what we get right, and I see the decline of the profession forecast more often than the hopes of a rosy future.
It feels different when I’m out in the field.
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If I may steal a line from Take That: “We've come a long way But we're not too sure where we've been” In music terms, the digital pathway is clear. From the time it took to record your music onto a C90 cassette (ask your parents!) and then spend ages fast forwarding and rewinding to find the right track, to today’s instant download options from thousands of songs, the progress and time saving is tangible. Our music is available to us in an instant.
In 2008, Professor Jens Krause and PhD student John Dyer of the University of Leeds, conducted an experiment into human herd mentality and how people, quite literally, follow the crowd*. Groups of people were asked to walk randomly around a hall. They were not allowed to communicate with one another but had to stay within arm’s length of another person at all times. Among the groups, a few individuals were given more specific instructions on where to walk. The researchers found that, very quickly, people started to follow the select few who appeared to know where they were going. The researchers found that it only took 5% of confident looking people to influence the direction of the other 95%.
Too much water of the wrong kind was the misfortune of the Ancient Mariner, quite literally the albatross hung around his neck, but, to paraphrase Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s rime about the cursed sailor, the modern day accountant will feel the frustration of ‘data, data everywhere nor any time to think’. Historically, the challenge of our profession has been the time it has taken to produce meaningful data, either on a client’s business or on the accounting firm itself. Incomplete records and the difficulty of extracting information has always held back our decision-making and actions.
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