In November 2018, Alan Nelson visited Sydney, Australia to take part in the World Congress of Accountants. This blog series focuses on his thoughts, views and what he learnt down under.
Day 3 of The World Congress of Accountants was about best practice. What is best, and how can we find it and utilise it?
The day culminated with a presentation from the world's most watched TedTalks presenter, Sir Ken Robinson. His theme was harnessing creativity and innovation. Currently, the pace of change in technology is presenting a threat to many finance jobs, so his session seemed particularly timely. Robinson shared a graph comparing the average age that human beings die, which has been steadily rising since the 1950s, with the average age of public companies, which has been following the opposite trajectory, the two intersecting in the late 1980s and the latter now dropping to the low 30s.
The rise of Netflix vs the demise of Blockbusters is a chilling comparison. Blockbusters declined to buy Netflix in the early days for what would have been a pittance, and while Blockbusters refused to believe that the new business models would gain traction, Netflix was busy creating a new paradigm, and then bet it all twice more. Firstly, they switched to streaming, and secondly they moved into content creation with the development of the first series of House of Cards.
Combine the uncomfortable morbidity rate of public companies with the pace of change in the profession then it becomes glaringly obvious that we all need to become more creative and innovative.
Robinson chose to turn the knife a little more. Bemoaning the time children spend head down on screens, he shared a marvellous, if almost certainly made up quote:
- "I saw a man in Starbucks today. He had no phone or anything. He just sat there drinking his coffee. Like a psychopath."
But Robinson saw at least part of the solution in management structures. Command and control structures will work well to deliver operational efficiency in the short term, but for survival in the longer term we need innovation and creativity, and for that, something more akin to climate control is needed, the emphasis being on culture not results.
And there's the rub. For me the question is not, "How do we stimulate creativity?" That is not as hard as it seems. The problem is that we are too consumed with the reality of day to day survival to do so. The question we should be asking ourselves is, "How do we prioritise the space required to focus on the future when the clamour for short term results will always be louder?"
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