Re-imagine accounting, NOW! Report from Sage Summit
Imagine a four star general, a world famous skateboarder, an actress, a baroness, and a world-class line-up of speakers in New Orleans for a week in the largest gathering of small-medium size businesses in the world!
That was last week at the Sage Summit where I had the privilege of speaking with several other of our Business Learning Institute thought leaders, where the attendance topped eight thousand.
Now imagine entirely new ways of doing business enabled by cloud and mobile technologies. It is time to Re-imagine our businesses and accounting or in the words of my friend, Emmanuel Gobillot, What got us here, won't get us there." It is time to re-imagine what we do and harness the latest tools and technologies and not forget the most important part of business - our people.
The opening session featured retired General Colin Powell and Deepak Chopra with Sage's new CEO Stephen Kelly (follow him on twitter @SKellyCEO). At first blush it was an eclectic panel, yet they all had very similar messages about positivity, strengths-based leadership, work-life balance, culture, and a focus on people.
My favorite quotes came from General Colin Powell who said, "perpetual optimism is a force multiplier."
And Deepak Chopra who said "good luck is opportunity meeting preparedness."
Deepak went on to stress that focusing on just one strength of your people, your disengagement falls to less than 1 percent.
They both talked about the power of purpose and vision.
Stephen Kelly made an impression on me when he said Sage was eliminating the term, ERP, from their vocabulary (and product lines). He said it stood for Expense, Regret and Pain and that Sage is positioning to make this software easier to work with in the future and cloud-based. In addition he announced some exciting new products like Sage Live, Sage Impact (for accountants) that I think are worth taking a look at.
Watch the full lineup of incredible speakers here.
Bottom-line: this new era of social, mobile, cloud, analytics, and collaboration means the time is now to pay attention and begin to re-imagine how our businesses and accounting needs to work. And how we do that matters because the future is not created, it is co-created with our people.
Here are a few other recaps:
And here are Colin Powell's 13 Life Rules for Any Future Leader and Deepak Chopra's The Soul of Leadership.
BLI is proud to support Sage's Leadership Education for Accounting Professionals (LEAP) and designed and facilitated their Vision to Strategy Workshops throughout North America