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Scoring Value at the World Cup

7/26/2018

 
Before winning the Soccer World Cup, France coach and former captain Didier Deschamps said: “I hope the players benefit from my experience, but this is their final. It is something they have worked for”.

In the victory jubilation Deschamps was tossed in the air by his winning team and had every reason to feel proud of his role as steward of talent.
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Business managers do well to imitate the French coach's appreciation of his people. To get the best out of your team, you need to value your players as your company’s biggest asset. They are the make or break between success and failure.

Research has shown that the number one determinant of happiness in the workplace is being appreciated. As a manager, your regard for your team members will determine how they perceive their value, and ultimately how they perform.

Accountants don’t show the value of people on a balance sheet. (Because we don’t own them and can’t measure their worth.) And yet HR managers rightly say “people are our greatest asset”.  

At a soccer club, the contractual right to use the services of a player, if not the actual person, is often listed. For example, World Cup breakout teenage star Kylian Mbappé's contract is worth a cool $210m. 

No need to remind his manager that business is both a people-game and a numbers game. 

Wishing you a goal setting and scoring week, 

Peter
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Calculated Confidence

7/19/2018

 
A meme is trending on the Internet at the expense of math teachers. It goes something like this: “Remember your math teacher saying ‘You won’t have a calculator everywhere you go?’ Haha. They were wrong!”

A picture of a smartphone then follows as proof of said teacher’s mistake. But hang on a second.
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Calculators are ubiquitous. But former math students shouldn’t be gloating. Always-at-hand calculators have made us lose our mental numeracy.  And that’s a bad thing.  Because numeracy goes beyond numbers. It allows us to reason and solve problems in both our professional and personal lives.

Numeracy is closely linked with self-esteem, which in turn affects decision-making. When we solve a math challenge, we gain confidence and the ability to navigate life situations with positivity and innate self-belief.

In working with business numbers, as with mental arithmetic,  practice builds confidence, and confidence encourages practice. 

The more confident managers feel around financial statements the more they use them, and the more insights they gain about their business.  The result is better decisions. 

We educators are first and foremost in the confidence building business. 

Peter
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(Gender) Balance in Accounting

7/12/2018

 
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a business seeking better returns must be in want of women.  (Sorry, Jane Austen) 

You see, research has shown that businesses - and particularly investment managers - perform better with a balance of men and women in the workplace. ​
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Too much testosterone can wreak havoc on financial behaviour. So here’s the conundrum: why are there not more women in executive leadership roles? 

“Women and minorities manage only 1% of the asset management industry’s $71 trillion in assets and only 15% of global mutual fund managers are women” says  Girls Who Invest.  It’s an organization that’s done the sums and exists to change them. 

Girls Who Invest selects about a hundred female students each year after a hard-fought application process. It then puts them through three-week summer camps at Wharton and the University of Notre Dame.  The women emerge prepped and inspired for a career in finance. 

Each year, after teaching the Color Accounting module at the camps, we leave uplifted.  The bright minds of the savvy up-and-comers, from widely diverse backgrounds, give us great cause for optimism.  

Clearly, balance shouldn’t only happen on balance sheets. 

Peter
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Riding the Light Beam

7/5/2018

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​Albert Einstein, the greatest scientific genius of his time, changed the very way we understand the universe.  

He discovered the truths that led to the equation E=MC2 and the theory of relativity by conducting visual thought experiments. Famously, he imagined riding alongside a beam of light. 
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Einstein had been unhappy at school in Germany where, in the late 1800s, schooling was rigid and all about rote learning. So he moved to German-speaking Switzerland and sought out a school in Aarau which followed the principles of Johann Pestalozzi, an educational reformer.  Those principles made all the difference and set him on the path to his breakthroughs.
 
Pestalozzi’s motto was “Learning by head, hand and heart”.  He wrote that “Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly.”  The learning of numbers must be subordinated to first understanding concepts, he believed.
 
On so many levels, our worldwide community of Color Accounting educators are proud to call ourselves “Pestalozzians”.  Belief in the individual. Use of hands in the learning process. The power of the visual BaSIS Framework we use.  And even the priority of words over numbers as one learns to make sense of financial statements.  
 
200 years later we are unreservedly happy to take our hats off to you, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, with a deference you wouldn’t demand from us.

Peter
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    Co-founder Peter Frampton is the lead author of this blog.

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