We are well into our Professional Issues Updates / townhall sessions, and the polling shows a consistent theme across all of our segments about the biggest challenges CPAs are facing.
Here is the latest summary of the top five challenges:
- Keeping up.
- Information overload.
- Reactive vs. proactive.
- Doing more with less.
- Complexity.
Which raises another question: What do you do about these?
Answer: Plan to attend the CPA Innovation Summit on June 16 at the Baltimore Hyatt Inner Harbor.
One day to catch up on all of the “breaking news” in the CPA profession – the latest standards changes (like FASB-PCC and FRF-SME), taxes, health care, leadership, and of course, cloud and technology.
One day to meet with the leaders in the profession. (Last year we had 13 of Accounting Today’s Top 100 people as speakers and sponsors.)
One day to get inspired. Starting with the keynote on resilience by Navy Seal Lt. Brad Snyder, wounded warrior and para-Olympian who will teach us about resilience.
One day to collaborate with your colleagues about how they are dealing with these challenges and flipping them into opportunities.
A word about collaboration and how it relates to innovation: The IBM Global CEO study identified collaboration as the top skill needed by global CEOs. Another just-released report from the American Management Association had collaboration among the top four skills. Both the CPA Vision 2011 Report and the more recent CPA Horizons 2025 Report had collaboration and synthesis in the top five competencies needed by CPAs for the future.
In the Forbes article “Why Personal Interaction Drives Innnovation and Collaboration,” Harbrinder Kang writes, “But one of the most important things we learned — which applies to social change — is the primary reason people collaborate is to innovate.” (Emphasis added.)