New Leadership Advisory Group sharpens its focus on what the future holds for finance professionals

BY BILL SHERIDAN, CAE

The future doesn’t reside at some nebulous point down the road. It isn’t coming next year, or next month, or next week. It’s here. Right now. As global business expert John Spence has said, “What you do today determines who you will be tomorrow.”

Folks at the AICPA and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants have been living that mantra for years now. They’ve been trying to define what they call “the future of finance” since well before the pandemic. In 2019 Ash Noah, managing director of CGMA learning, education and development at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, said preparing for finance’s future meant leveraging technology solutions, adopting a mindset of continuous learning, broadening our digital skills, and developing our teams’ “human” skills like leadership, empathy, creativity, and strategic planning.

Those ideas still apply today, though given the transformative business environment that followed the pandemic, AICPA officials have since adopted Abraham Lincoln’s philosophy as well: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Specifically, they are co-creating it with a who’s who of senior finance executives, CFOs, and chief accounting officers known collectively as the Future of Finance Leadership Advisory Group. Its initial meetings have produced a crowdsourced vision of what the future of finance might ultimately look like.

“We’re all walking this finance transformation journey together toward what we now call the chief future officer. That’s the new role of the CFO,” Tom Hood, AICPA and CIMA’s executive vice president of business engagement and growth, told the Journal of Accountancy recently. “This group is helping us fill out what that future looks like. That’s what’s so exciting.”

Going forward, Hood said the group’s mission is to “sharpen its focus” and bring more clarity to what the long-term future of the profession looks like. At the center of that vision are talent, technology and, perhaps most important, trust. “That’s a huge advantage for our profession,” AICPA President and CEO Barry Melancon said. “It’s what society at large wants and needs, and we’re well-positioned from that standpoint.”

Hood spoke with MACPA Chief Communications Officer Bill Sheridan for a recent edition of the association’s “FutureProof” podcast, a conversation that centered on the trends that are impacting finance professionals, the opportunities that exist in this post-pandemic world, and the ideas that are emerging from meetings of the Future of Finance Leadership Advisory Group. The following is a transcription of that conversation.

BILL SHERIDAN: Tom, thanks, as always, for joining me here. The future of finance is a phrase that gets thrown out a lot these days in terms of the trends and challenges and opportunities facing our profession, but you’ve taken the reins of a fairly new group that’s trying to put some meat on those bones — the Future of Finance Leadership Advisory Group.Tell me a little bit about the makeup of this group.

TOM HOOD: When I first came over to the AICPA and CIMA, Barry Melancon and Andrew Harding (chief executive of management accounting with the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants) wanted to connect more deeply with the CFO community. Almost half our members work in business and industry, finance, accounting, non-profits, et cetera, and that’s my background, too. The first 18 years of my career was as a CFO in private industry. So we started reaching out to many of these folks and found out that they are all dealing with the same issues. That raised the question: Would you like to get together and co-create what we think this new future is going to look like? Coming on as the fog clears from the pandemic, what’s going to be new and different for the future of finance? They all said yes.

Over the past 18 months, we have met every other month for about an hour and a half. We had our first summit in Nashville in 2021, and by the time we held our second summit this past December in Austin, the group had grown considerably. We had just over one hundred CFOs from very large, well-respected companies, from Amazon Web Services to Hewlett Packard — a great mix of middle market to large corporations. The energy and enthusiasm was incredible. Most important, our Future of Finance Leadership Group designed the agenda by prioritizing the major themes that we were talking about. Andrew Harding even said, “We were in this two-day conference and we didn’t talk about numbers once.”

BS: Pretty remarkable for a group of CFOs.

TH: Exactly. So what are those priorities? We updated our poll of what the top issues are. Number one is talent, recruitment and retention, the pipeline. Number two is the need for new skills. Number three is digital transformation, and number four is leading and managing a remote and hybrid workforce and keeping your culture strong. technology automates a lot of the basic accounting and financial functions.

BS: That’s a really interesting list there. All of the issues seem to be related to people. What stood out for you as that list took shape?

TH: That list has shifted a bit. We’ve been carrying this polling across conferences and with this group for the last year and a half. Interesting enough, when we first started, talent didn’t even show up in the top eight. Then pretty quickly, it shot up to number two and then to number one, and it has stayed at number one ever since. The other ones have shifted. For instance, inflation was probably number five initially.

One of my favorite things during the pandemic was a cartoon that showed a group of people sitting in a conference room in a high-rise building. One of them says, “Digital transformation is years away.

BS: What skills are they finding that they need the most?

TH: It goes back to the T-shaped professional — the boundary-crossing skills that are needed now that all the finance professionals are starting to move quickly into the role of value creator or finance business partner to the organization. That requires strategic thinking, communication, awareness, anticipation of the trends in the environment. Agility is another skill that keeps coming up. Businesses are having to move a lot quicker, and finance teams are having to keep in step with that. And you can wrap all of that around collaboration, which is critical to work with different organizations. Those skills, along with digital business model skills, are the things that are necessary today, and they all happen to be part of the CGMA strategic level of our finance leadership program. The need for talent and the need to upskill that new talent

I don’t see our company having to change anytime soon.” And meanwhile, just outside the window, a big wrecking ball labeled “COVID” is swinging in. Who’s going to lead our digital transformation?

It’s COVID. Futurist Daniel Burrus said COVID accelerated all the major trends in business by at least five years — e-commerce alone accelerated by 10 years during that period.

Every one of these finance groups, regardless of their size, are in the midst of an ongoing finance transformation. On top of the talent shortage, this transformation has created the need for new skills — an upskilling of critical finance areas as are showing up in a big way for these finance folks, but they also have to lead their transformations and they have to help their companies navigate inflation, increase costs, supply chain issues — all of these other issues.

What they tell us consistently is this: The problem isn’t any one issue, it’s that they’re all happening at the same time.

BS: That seems to require some shortterm focus and a much longer-term focus almost at the same time. And that’s got to be challenging, to say the least.

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TH: No doubt. It’s interesting, because the group came together and we started to see a community emerge. This group really came together, one hundred of them, and they all said consistently that they felt like they were all walking the same journey. They found a group of kindred spirits that are all trying to deal with this, and they love the fact that we convened this group to help each other. It really was like a big CFO self-help group. We had plenty of case studies on what companies were doing and what kind of skills they were looking for. That sharing and collaboration was just powerful — talk about the wisdom of the crowd! All of the content was created by this community. We had a couple of keynotes, a lot of workshops, and then the leadership advisor group put on several of these big sessions, everything from talent and the transformation stories to how they’re dealing with some of the critical issues in business. It was truly remarkable.

BS: That speaks to — and you’ve talked about this for years, but the idea that none of us are going to find our own way out of this. We’re at a point now where we’ve got to co-create what comes next with those who we might have once seen as rivals. I think it’s become obvious that we’re all in the same boat here, and we’ve got to work together to find our way out of it.

TH: I think that’s it, because there’s no way that any one person could keep up with all this stuff, and the fact that you’ve got this group of one hundred and they’re showcasing the different stages that they’re all in.

The other part that came out of this is the idea that we’re going to see continuous waves of transformation. This group came to an awareness that it’s not going to end. We have to prepare our teams, our organizations for this kind of constant moving and transforming as new things emerge on the horizon. We’re going to see wave after wave, getting bigger and faster. One of my favorite quotes is, “We can’t stop the waves, but we can learn how to surf.” I like to think about this group as a collection of surfing lessons for these big waves of transformation.

BS: It’s all about learning the lessons from the first wave so we can make the transition a little bit smoother the next time around.

TH: Exactly.

BS: Was there any talk among the group about the opportunities that exist for our profession, or next steps we should be taking?

TH: Yeah, there are lots of opportunities. For instance, talk about becoming a value partner, but let’s look at ESG. This group, even back in Nashville in 2021, said, “CFOs need to lead environmental, social, and governance issues,” because ESG puts them in a place of looking at value creation for the organization and not strictly taking a defensive reporting stance. The idea is, let’s move out of compliance. Yes, we’re all going to have to help do the reporting and figure that out in our companies. But the group said, “This is a chance to look at these things from a different perspective. Yelp did a preview for us of how they’re looking at ESG. BP talked about agile finance. There were a lot of examples coming from the group that were powerful.

Another opportunity centers on our newly registered apprenticeship program. We are the first registered apprenticeship program for finance and accounting in the United States. In mid-November the Secretary of Labor recognized our profession as one of the top three innovative talent apprentices in the United States. Now, when I say apprentice, what comes to mind?

BS: To me, it’s a blue-collar notion.

TH: Exactly. Concrete workers. I was in the asphalt business earlier in my career and we had tons of apprentices. Now there’s this new breed called professional apprenticeships. Among those recognized by the (Department of Labor) are finance and accounting, cybersecurity — actually, it was McDonald’s cyber work that they’re doing for their headquarters in Chicago, and then a nonprofit association for cybersecurity and the work they’re doing in that area. It’s a whole new model. Now, we added a two-year pathway specifically to address diversity, equity and inclusion opportunities. You can take someone literally out of an HBCU (historically black college or university) or a two-year program and get them on a path through our profession. Every apprenticeship has to have required technical learning, and it turns out that the Department of Labor certified our learning as the right learning to give the experience needed for finance business partners.

So we’re now kicking that program off, and it’s pretty exciting. That’s about addressing the talent pipeline without hurting the CPA pipeline. We’re opening the aperture on it and offering some of these new pathways and ways for employers to get in and get experienced hires coming out of school.

BS: And there’s a Maryland tie-in with this apprenticeship program, am I correct?

TH: These employers are all over the country, but we started to talk to folks in Maryland, and the Maryland Department of Labor — which also licenses CPAs, by the way — they helped us, and we got a grant approved for scholarships that will help pay for a CGMA education for up to about 20 apprentices.

Basically, we’re offering employers in Maryland that apprentice for free. You have to do a little bit of reporting, and we facilitate all that. But we’re talking to Maryland employers right now about that. If anyone reading this is interested, just reach out to me and we can connect to them and talk about it. That’s pretty exciting.

BS: A lot of this stuff sounds almost like a shift in mindset. Have you noticed anything that the most innovative or forward-thinking finance leaders are doing in terms of these challenges that the rest of us aren’t doing? What’s setting apart the cream of the crop in your mind?

TH: What many of them are saying is, “We can no longer wait and hire people from the outside.” Most big companies hire their finance talent from their auditors. What they’re saying is, “We have to build our own pipeline.” So the innovators are looking at their transformation objectives and their timelines, and they’re beginning to create learning programs for their professionals that are developing the right skills so when comprised mainly of educators. A couple hundred college professors in management accounting got together in Atlanta recently. In that, we had several sessions where we brought in future of finance people to give them the reality of what’s going on in the marketplace. It was eye-opening, quite frankly, for these professors because they’re struggling with the talent issue as well. The pipeline is thinner, fewer applicants are coming into their colleges. So we’re trying to help them figure out how they can play a role in recruitment and how they can also adjust their curriculum for the real world. There were some rich discussions and we’re going to continue that journey.

Then you have to understand how their careers are working and begin to match that information to your transformation journey. Most of these big companies, and even some mid-size companies like Liberty Bank are applying these new skills. As they say, it’s not enough to know anymore — you have to know how. The apprenticeship is on-the-job training on top of experiential learning. The CGMA finance leadership program is scenariobased. It’s case studies. It’s like doing the job. That gives you the learning to supplement what you learn in college and take it to an experience level and then apply it on the job, which is where you get that extra mentoring from the apprenticeship. Now, not everybody is going to be an apprentice, but the point is you need more experiential learning scenarios and application to go with your knowledge. That’s the big emphasis right now. We’ve got to accelerate people on our teams to get that experience quickly so they can continue to learn and develop.

We’re trying to work at all levels. (The AAA) is the entry level of the pipeline from college. Then, with this future of finance group, I think the next step is to present at a number of conferences this year. We also will begin talking with state CPA societies who are interested about how to plug in a future of finance element automation starts automating things, they’re ready to move up into that next level of analytics, storytelling, and communication. It’s about investing in your talent strategically with the right capabilities, competencies, and skills, and that’s where we’re trying to help them.

BS: Where should finance professionals focus their efforts in the very near future, based on what you’ve learned from this group?

TH: One area is understanding demographics. We’re now experiencing a very different wave of demographics. The boomers are retiring. We know there are not many Gen Xers in the workforce — that’s been challenging all along. Then you have a big pool of millennials and members of Gen Z coming up behind who have very different mindsets. To that point, you have to understand the demographics of your group.

BS: For readers who might want to learn more or follow the conversation or actually be part of the conversation going forward, where should they turn to learn more about this?

TH: On LinkedIn, you can follow #FutureOfFinance — all one word. If you search for that on LinkedIn and click “Follow,” you’ll see all of the feeds that are coming from that. Most everything we’re doing, we’re putting out there. You can also reach out to me at tom.hood@ aicpa-cima.com, or connect to me on LinkedIn, and then you can message me and we’ll figure out how to get you what you need. We’d love to hear from more folks.

BS: What’s on the horizon for you and your team?

TH: We just finished up at the American Accounting Association’s Management Accounting Section. The Triple A is and take the resources that we’ve got and bring them to the local level. From there, we’ll begin to accelerate getting feedback and perspectives from this audience. It’s about learning from the entire group. We’re trying to figure that model out right now, but that’s what we’ve got in store.

BS: Much more to come, so stay tuned on all that. It’s going to be fascinating to follow and to work with you and find out where we’re going with all this. Thanks for being here, and for your insights and all you do.

TH: Thank you, Bill. It’s going to be good to stay connected on this.

Bill Sheridan, CAE,

is

editor of The Statement and chief communications officer of the Maryland Association of CPAs.