If You’re Bored Then You’re Boring…A.K.A. (Sorry About The Length of this Post)
As some of my regular cross-over readers know, I am a PhD drop-out from Cornell University. I was studying economics and had a full fellowship with tuition, healthcare, and a basic living stipend paid by the university while I studied. I had similar offers to study at UCSD, U. Maryland, U Virginia, Ohio State, and a number of other well known universities. I began to blog as an undergraduate studying for my economics and statistics degree. Upon dropping out of my math economics PhD program I sort of fell into the accounting field.
The economics blog universe was small when I began to blog…but it continually grew with more and more blogs each month. I developed a blog style that was highly dependent on interaction with other blogs through commenting on others posts, reading a post written by another blogger that would spark a new idea in me, and the free exchange of opinion on whatever the controversial subject of the day happened to be. I loved it, and the process never seemed to be burdensome. Blogging about accounting/auditing is nothing like my experience blogging about economics. Why?
Both subjects are considered dry by most of the population. Notwithstanding the occasional pop-culture breakthrough of people like Steven Levitt , Milton Friedman, or Robert Kiyosaki for the most part explaining your job to a person at a cocktail party will more likely then not be met with glazed over eyes and the summoning of additional cocktails to get through the boredom of the field of economics or accounting.
For the last few months I have thought that my newness to the field made writing about accounting difficult. All SAS statements are new to me so SAS 99 is as new to me as the newest statement coming down the pipeline. Backdating seems criminal to me…but my newness in the field leaves me second-guessing my knee-jerk reaction on the subject…”maybe there is something I am missing”, I think to myself. This stops me from posting for fear of looking like an uneducated loaf on the subject.
Another contributing factor to my lack of productivity is the audit/tax busy season (I have learned that the busy season is much longer then the non-busy season in an audit company). My audit busy season is from August to December. I also do tax work so I have to withstand another busy season from February to April. In economics when I was extremely busy my blog production went up. I was exploring new ideas, learning tons, and wanted to blog about it all. I have a similar desire to blog during the busy season now. The problem is how to blog about interesting subject that come up over the course of the day without disclosing information about the entity I am auditing. Generalization about the field work…but they are less interesting then the nuts and bolts of actual occurrences. Furthermore, although I have never disclosed the company I work for or the clients I am working on, it would not be hard to figure these things out…and if a client ever gets litigious I don’t want to be a target in any way. So during the busy season, the things I most want to blog about become off limits and since I am soo busy I have little time to pursue other areas of interest that would be pertinent to this blog.
The lack of other active bloggers interested in the subjects I am interested in is also hindering my blog productivity. There are many blogs that deal with new tax laws, or big-four happenings, or discuss industry problems from a firm’s perspective. But these things don’t interest me as much as the anecdotes about the field and how they relate to the experience of being an accountant/auditor. The lack of staff and senior level day-to-day blogging leaves the accounting/audit blogosphere without much of a dialogue. The back and forth dialogue of an active blog community is sorely missing in the accounting/audit blog community. My eyes are rarely opened to a new idea, or a fresh prospective on old topics. Where is the innovation in the field? Who is criticizing the status-quo? Where is the debate? People like Dennis Howlett, Krupo, and the Anonymous Accountant (when s/he was blogging) do a fantastic job, but I need far more people to read on my RSS feed. A community of four or five is not enough to obtain a critical mass that perpetuates itself for more then a few months.
There is an old saying that if you are bored you are probably boring, inferring that dynamic people find ways to occupy their life and avoid boredom. Boring people don’t do this and by default become bored. I am open to the prospect that I may be boring (for gods sake I enjoy economics, math/statistics, and accounting…the possibility is real). But it is possible for dynamic people to be bored in a boring environment. The accounting/audit blogosphere community is boring at the moment. I hope I am contributing to changing this….I pray others will step-up to the plate and grow the community and rock the boat a bit.
Update: I want to read posts like this in the accounting field (Thanks for the link Krupo)…
…The real cause of September 11th was lazy associates, public interest attorneys, and law students from second-tier schools. I haven’t yet figured out the details of my argument, but give me the weekend and I’ll come up with something. Obviously they’re the cause of every other problem in society, so why should 9/11 be any different? They’re the cause of global warming (hardworking associates don’t have any time to pollute), rampant disease (hardworking associates don’t interact with anyone, so they can’t spread illnesses), poverty (hardworking associates have all the money they need, building up lots of interest since they have no time to spend it), divorce (hardworking associates don’t have time to date and get married in the first place), overpopulation (hardworking associates die young), the social security crisis (hardworking associates die young), the Medicare shortfall (hardworking associates have private insurance, and die young), food shortages (hardworking associates don’t have time to eat, and die young), and more. So why shouldn’t they be the cause of terrorism as well. I’ll figure out the link. It’ll just take a few days.
Update II: Welcome Neil McIntyre On Accounting readers, I hope you enjoy and stick around a bit. Feel free to add me to your RSS feed….
Thanks for the link.
on January 23rd, 2007 at 1:25 am
Hi and thanks for the hat tip. Nice to know you enjoy my ’stuff.’
Your issue - and I hope you see this as encouragement rather than in-your-face suggestions. When you get through studying, and even if you haven’t, could you get transferred onto some M&A deals, do a bit of tech advisory, look at small client marketing issues. Have you ever thought about the business value you might add to clients as you crunch out those audits and tax returns. If you’re up for a challenge, I’d recommend Richard Murphy’s Tax Justice blog - he’s trying to change the world and is not doing too shabbily. He sure as heck makes me think and occasionally we have heated discussions. But we respect one another.
There’s plenty to write about and the good thing is that the more I write, the more I discover what works and what doesn’t. Here’s the good bit. After a while you become a site that people want to turn up at each day or whatever. You start and encourage conversations. You learn.
You’ve been at this thing for 6 months now. Unless you’re some sort of rock star writer with instant appeal (very rare), it takes a good year to get the blog anywhere near right and even then you can foul up. I don’t worry about those things. I try and watch, listen, learn, post comments so other people know who I am. I’m finding it increasingly useful to engage with professionals like tax lawyer blogs and some of the modern day management gurus like David Maister and Bob Sutton are well worth attention.
Here’s a promise. You’ll learn more about successful and profitable client relationships this way than you ever will by being thrown in the deep end at an audit. Cripes - when you do that stuff, you’re already perceived as the enemy. Audit folk need all the help they can get so maybe use this as a free training course on best practice client stuff?
Finally - I need to hear more accounting jokes. If you’ve got any I’d love to know. Thanks for your attention and I hope I haven’t come across as a lecturing old fart.
on January 27th, 2007 at 12:05 am
LOL, glad you like the link; although it only serves to highlight a problem: the Anonymous Lawyer site, besides dealing with the same issues you’ve just discussed by being ‘anonymous’, also claims (to some unidentified extent) to be ficitional, making it hard to tell the satire apart from the reality.
On a legal “CYA” level, this is a brilliant move.
But on a “is it real” level, it feels more like you’re reading a work in progress from a fictional novel than something you can really relate to.
But then, what do I know? I don’t actually working in a legal firm.
Still, I find there’s some good cross-over between the accounting/legal spheres (they’re partnerships, deal with clients, etc.) to compensate for the relatively small professional populations.
on February 3rd, 2007 at 5:53 pm
[…] The Detoured Economist comments on the trouble with being an accountant blogger - namely that we have all sorts of interesting things happen to us every day at client’s, but we’re bound by confidentiality so we can’t share them. I completely agree, but there’s really no way around it. […]
on February 28th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Nice post. I enjoy reading the work of bloggers that are not hindered by conventional stereotypes of “accountant-speak”. I’m still trying to hone my blogging style but feel that I too have had difficulty finding true opinionated prose on the day-to-day experiences of accounting and audit professionals. I’ll continue to check back.
on December 13th, 2007 at 8:51 am
[…] Accounting for a Detoured Economist ” If You’re Bored Then You’re … … a blog style that was highly dependent on interaction with other blogs through … the field and how they relate to the experience of being an accountant/auditor. … […]
on December 20th, 2007 at 11:36 am
[…] Accounting for a Detoured Economist ” If You’re Bored Then You’re … … a blog style that was highly dependent on interaction with other blogs through … the field and how they relate to the experience of being an accountant/auditor. … […]
on June 7th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Accountants are not known for their communication skills, and yet the core of their service is to communicate the complex techinal detail to their clients. Communication is a skill that we all acquire with time. Blogging makes it so much easier.