Preface

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, essayist, scholar, mathematical statistician, risk analyst

[Ron] It has been nearly two decades since Paul and I published The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services. Readers would always ask us what we would change if we were to update it, and my reply was always, "Not much." As one author put it, "Writing a book is more risky than having a child. After all, you can always disown a child." We still take responsibility for the ideas laid out in the book, and believe it's held up quite well, especially since most business books don't have a long shelf life. The book did change the lexicon in the professions, introducing such terms as intellectual capital, human capital, social capital, value pricing, and effectiveness over efficiency.

Yet times change. New business models arise that disrupt industries, including the professions. You've experienced it with the rapid pace of technology now being deployed across professional firms, from cloud accounting and artificial intelligence, to Robotic Process Automation and the blockchain. These technologies are important, allowing professional firms to do more work in less time, which is why the "we sell time" business model was obsolete even in 2003, when The Firm of the Future was first published.

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated for us another hinge point in history: The importance of relationships. Sure, professional firms have always been relational, to the point of paying lip service to the importance of being so. But look at what we have the customers pay for: transactions, scope of work, and efforts. Would it not be more optimal if we aligned our business and revenue models with our values, both as professionals and businesspeople? To restore the original reason, and purpose, of why we entered our profession in the first place? The reason certainly wasn't billing the most hours, or processing the most tax returns, but rather to help people and make a lasting impact on the lives of the customers we are privileged to serve.

Historian Will Durant wrote, "Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." The hardest part of learning something new is unlearning so much of what one already thinks one knows. Another question I am constantly asked: "Aren't you worried about people stealing your ideas?" When it comes to intellectual capital, this is misguided thinking. As I learned from Howard Hathaway Aiken, who was a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer: "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." Besides, if I give away all my intellectual capital, it compels me to replenish it, which in turn forces me to unlearn and adjust to creative destruction.

There are essentially two ways to change a mind. Change your thoughts, or change your behavior. The Jewish tradition of attaching tefillin insists you bind your arm before you bind your head, stressing changing behavior as a way of changing your thoughts and mind rather than the reverse.

However, in a book, it is nearly impossible to accomplish this type of behavioral change, since we can only make you think with us, and that is a process of the mind. But both methods are effective, and if you begin to challenge why your firm exists, including what you monetize and measure, you will be able to alter people's behavior as well as their thoughts.

I cannot speak for Paul, but I experienced a wide range of emotions researching and writing this book-from optimism and pessimism, to incomprehensible and unknowable thoughts and challenges, and plenty of cognitive dissonance in between-and no doubt you will do the same as you read it. I do not consider this a disadvantage, or a sign of unclear expression. On the contrary, it is the indisputable consequence of dealing with the most significant aspects of the professions. You simply must struggle with them if you are to seek the truth of a changing marketplace. As I continue to learn I am constantly taking one step closer to that truth while knowing I will never arrive.

We want you to subject everything we write to your own belief system, challenging and discarding what you think is wrong, while acknowledging what may be right. We do not want you to think like us, but with us. But think you must. This book is a conversation between us; but you, dear reader, have the last word.

Ronald J. Baker

Petaluma, California

June 30, 2022

[Paul] This is a very different book than you might expect.

Typically, when two people are shown on the cover as "authors," you're never really sure who wrote what-their thoughts are (mostly) combined as one voice.

That's not the case here. And there's a very good reason for that.

Every time Ron and I speak at conferences, it's always me going first, setting some frameworks in place, putting some stakes in the ground. And then Ron follows and pounds those stakes firmly and deeply into the ground.

And that's what we've decided to do here with the added benefit that we know ahead of time what the other one is going to say (sometimes we surprise ourselves and say things on stage that neither me nor Ron have ever said before!).

So, in a way, continuing with that rural "stakes in the ground" metaphor, I'm tilling the ground, ready for Ron to create a harvest for you.

And I'm thrilled to be doing that because, in a funny kind of way, it gives me more scope-scope to share my passions, my purpose, my insights, and so on.

You'll learn later on how Ron and I first met in 1996. Every single meeting continues to be amazing as we explore ideas together.

And that process of exploration and discovery took a deep dive in 2002.

That's when Ron and I "sat down" (him in California, me mostly in France at the time) to write our first book together, The Firm of the Future. That was a very different time.

Even though at the time it seemed very fast, looking back now it was so slow. As someone put it once, "Things will never be slower than they are today."

There was no Zoom, people still faxed things. And we had face-to-face meetings with time to spare in between.

And here we are at the beginning of 2022 as I write this, having experienced a two-year plus period on our planet unlike any other.

Of course, it's easy to focus on COVID-19 and the havoc it created. Yet so many great things happened in 2021 alone that we could not have imagined (including Ron and I getting together for this book).

Here's a list of just 10 of those great things, sourced from the New York Times, "2021 Year in Review" list:

1. An African woman led the World Trade Organization.
2. A purely digital artwork sold at auction for $64 million.
3. A human brain was wirelessly connected to a computer via a transmitter device.
4. Mexico elected its first transgender lawmakers.
5. The world's first 3D-printed school opened in Malawi.
6. El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin a national currency.
7. NASA's Perseverance rover made oxygen on Mars, and the James Webb Space Telescope was launched to look back so much farther than Hubble.
8. National Geographic cartographers recognized the Southern Ocean as the world's fifth ocean.
9. SpaceX launched the first all-civilian crew into space.
10. Sales of zero-emission vehicles surpassed diesel sales in Europe.

And things were happening that would not make the Times' list.

For example, the pandemic meant that some professional knowledge firms got hammered in so many ways. Yet many grew in more ways, too.

Significantly, perhaps, business owners were (for the very first time that I've seen) literally begging their external advisors (accountants and lawyers in particular) to help with all the "advisory" things governments required them to do so that their businesses could get their hands on stimulus payments during lockdowns.

And, sticking with accountants for a moment, here's what Tom Hood (now the EVP Business Engagement & Growth at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants) had to say three months into the pandemic:

This presents an amazing opportunity for our profession to play an important role to shape the future with insight and integrity. A new world is upon us. Those who conquer it will be those who reimagine, redefine, and reinvent themselves and their businesses. This is our opportunity to make this our defining moment.

And then in July 2021, long-time AICPA president Barry Melancon said this:

We are now in a world reimagined, a world forever different from the profession prior to COVID.

We won't recognize the profession in five years. The change is going to be phenomenal going forward.

In 1996, Andy Grove, the late CEO of Intel, famously wrote:

The point in the life of a business [or an industry] when its fundamentals are about to change. The change can mean an...