Seth Godin is primarily a marketing and management guy, so his books don’t often hit the list of books finance and accounting people should read. Which is a shame, because at times I felt like this book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, spoke directly to the financial person in me.

Early on, Godin references a quote by Steve Jobs that has become somewhat famous. Jobs would say, “Real artists ship.” Here is what Godin says about that:

When Steve Jobs said that, he was calling the bluff of a recalcitrant engineer who couldn’t let go of some code. But this three-word mantra goes deeper than that. Poet Bruce Ario said, “Creativity is an instinct to produce.”

Jobs wasn’t talking about the guy painting murals in the Apple office, he was talking about an engineer working on a product. An artist, nonetheless. Whatever you’re doing – making product, selling services, churning out monthly reports, designing a user interface – you’re producing art. Artists aren’t just those who paint, play guitar, or take really cool pictures. You’re an artist.

Godin puts it this way:

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.

That would be you.

Artists do it for the art, not for the paycheck, not for the boss, not for the company. If you want to become indispensable, think like an artist. Produce stuff that works, whatever it is. Create a new way of doing something laborious that everybody in your organization complains about. If you want that next strategic planning presentation to rock the CEO, tackle it like an artist.

I know, it’s idealistic. Godin is a big thinker and he makes big assertions that may seem difficult to implement as you slog through another month-end close with a five year old computer, an antiquated operating system, and too few hours in the day to chip away at your six month backlog of projects. That’s okay, you can ease into this artist thing. I struggle with it, but it helps to think of it as a latitude change, a shifting of a mindset.

If you’re leery, and you don’t want to commit to the book, follow Seth Godin’s blog here. It will keep you interested with almost daily insights into marketing and management. Or you could go to his free stuff page and dip your foot into Godin’s sea of knowledge.

If this topic of a linchpin is especially interesting to you, download Godin’s free Brainwashed PDF. It’s fourteen, nicely formatted pages that will spur some thinking about “shipping great art.” It could be the best 10 minutes you spend today.

UPDATE: I found this additional resource on Seth Godin’s blog. It’s a linchpin hierarchy.

If you haven’t tapped your Receivables and Cash Applications staff for hints on collaboration and knowledge management, then there’s a risk you’re leaving a potential resource untapped. Let’s dig a little deeper into the nature of their jobs to see what I mean.

The crew in Receivables and Cash Apps (RCA) are on the front lines of your company’s cash flow. They’re the primary interface between your customers and your bank account. Their role entails juggling some very delicate conversations with customers with intense pressure from two major internal constituencies, management and the sales force.

Management wants cash in the door with little exposure to deadbeat customers. The sales force wants to get product/services in the hands of customers without impediments. And when issues arise, neither group cares about vacation days, sick days, or who on the RCA crew is taking flex time. They want/need answers now.

With these forces in play, it’s imperative for the whole RCA crew to be on board with a departmental sharing and documentation methodology. For this they usually use the built-in notes and documentation aspect of the operating system, which works fine. I challenge you to walk over to someone in RCA and ask about the collection status of any customer; ask anyone in the department, just toss a customer out there. They’ll probably pull up the operating system, do a wildcard search on the name of the customer, and immediately begin relaying stuff like this:

• Status summary
• Collection statistics
• Details about the last few discussions with the customer
• Background information from the sales person handling the customer
• Names and numbers of parties involved, internally and externally

All of this stuff is at their fingertips because it has to be. Cash collections and getting sales booked are too important for it not to be. The RCA crew needs to be constantly engaged with internal and external sources of information and they need to get it recorded in a trusted system so it can be accessed by any authorized user at any time.

They don’t have any choice. It’s as if they are keeping an internal blog specific to their own set of issues. Heck, when I asked you to “walk over to someone in RCA” I was being funny. If you have access, you should be able to get that same information by pulling it up on your own.

That’s the power of collaboration and knowledge management.

Let’s extrapolate this to the rest of your finance staff. As it stands now, I’m guessing that if you walk over to the accounting department and request details on a journal entry, someone will pull a three-ring binder off the shelf and scramble to find the entry. Once they find it, it will probably have handwritten notes with some background and other support documentation. In all probability, further research will need to be done to resolve any questions.

It doesn’t have to be this way. What if there was a system to keep notes, thoughts, assumptions, and background on all of your journal entries kind of like this receivables and collections system? What if you had an internal blog with tagged and searchable information relevant to each journal entry?

That’s the first step to collaboration and knowledge management nirvana, a trusted system. I’m talking about something outside of manila folders, three-ring binders, email strings, and shared documents on the network. I’m talking about a system (preferably in the cloud) that’s shared by finance and links up the milieu of notes, conversations, thoughts, and documents so that anyone with access can make sense of them without burdening the organization with questions.

For my collaboration tool (internally and with clients), I primarily use the 37Signals suite of Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. That means that if we’re working on a project together, all of the notes, discussions, brainstorming sessions, files and documentation are going to be in one place. There won’t be any need for you or your team to call me or email me to get the latest version of something. And for a project status, if you can’t reach me you can still get it by logging on to the collaboration tool using your own email address and a password of your choosing. And mostly, there won’t be long email strings that you’ll have to sort through to refresh your memory on important discussions.

There a ton of options in this arena. I’m not too familiar with Microsoft’s offering, but I’ve heard great things about Sharepoint and it’s capabilities. I’m also testing Microsoft OneNote, which seems to have many collaboration capabilities. And finally, as you know, I’m well versed in Google Apps as a collaboration and general productivity tool. I’ll continue the conversation and be reviewing these in future posts.

Did you see the recent Newsweek article entitled I Can’t Think! from science writer Sharon Begley? It’s about information overload and how our brains often struggle with too much information. It’s highly applicable to decision-makers in any organization and may help your Finance department get better at matching the right amount of information with the business decision at hand.

Step back for a moment and think about the last few informational documents you’ve received or churned out. Have you plowed through the 30 page monthly performance report yet? How far have you gotten on those weekly sales updates from the field? Were you able to stay focused for the 75 page binder used for the annual budget meeting…now that it’s over, are you ready to go to the CEO and explain what your EBITDA number is going to be next year and why?

If you’re struggling to assimilate this deluge of information and make decisions with it, you should know that you’re normal. Here’s what Begley says:

But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

Physically, our brains can’t handle it, according to a study by Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University. When your brain is bombarded with too much information, here’s what Ms. Dimoka found (quoted from the Newsweek article):

As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises.

So the question is, what can we, in the Finance department, do about this? In most organizations, Finance is the gatekeeper and monitor of the information used for business decisions, so Finance directly impacts information overload. I think information overload is also related to increasing complexity. Both of these items need to be addressed, we need to stem the rising tide of information and complexity so that we can become better decision makers. Is it too much of a burden on Finance to be the complexity police?

Let’s start sorting through some solutions. Here’s a worthwhile resource that targets complexity – take a look at the video/webinar associated with this article from the Harvard Business Review. It’s almost as if Ron Ashkenas is talking directly to CFO types and Controllers. If you want, skip to these points for a little more focused viewing:

The Book (14:45) – The “internal cottage industry” in big companies that churns out a binder full of data for the CEO every month is standard operating procedure for many Finance departments. Is it really worth it? Is all that data being used? Just ask the question. Be honest with your organizations, as Seth Godin suggests, and ask, “Are we measuring this because it’s important or does it just appear important because we are measuring it?”

The Budget (17:36) – Does your company’s budget process take six to nine months? Most of the “churn and decision spin” is internal and can be eliminated. Map out the process, make it a priority to reduce complexity, and monitor your progress.

Standard Definitions (26:40) – I really like this SAP implementation example and how to clean up some complexity brought about by the enterprise system.

The problem is that the very act of reducing complexity and information overload could actually add to them in the short run. For example, a meeting about complexity could be a complex meeting. Let’s face it, the last thing your already thin Finance department needs is another initiative. So let’s prioritize it in this order:

1. Stuff under your control: Don’t contribute to information overload and more complexity yourself. Whatever you’re doing, think about how complex it is and choose the path of least complexity. Don’t ever stop at, “It’s a complicated issue so it’s a complicated analysis.” Press on and at least attempt to demystify.
2. Stuff under your influence: When you’re on a project team and you’re sorting through options, make information overload/complexity an issue. Push back on people who want to add new spreadsheets. Question managers who need new reports. Reducing complexity and focusing on the right amount of information should be part of the criteria for anything your team undertakes, just like increasing accuracy, and improving timeliness.
3. Long term/big picture: Start an initiative to reduce complexity and make things smaller (another great point by Seth Godin). Try these: Clean out and organize your shared network space, publish terminology documents, or rebuild analytical reports using nothing smaller than a 30 point font (suggested by Guy Kawasaki). These take time and focus. Make a list of complexity reduction priorities and start working on them as a team.

Good luck and happy complexity reduction to you and your crew. Soon, I’ll start a list of ways to reduce information overload and complexity. Stop back soon.

I use Google Apps and they’re getting better every day. Lately, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time building spreadsheets in Google Docs and experimenting with Google web forms to compile data. Yes, they have disadvantages, but most of them relate to speed and responsiveness, not functionality, which is heartening.

I do a lot of heavy lifting with spreadsheets and databases. I’m in them all day long so I’m particular about the in-app experience. I know how to get around Excel and Access and I’ve become relatively decent at exploiting them to get things done. So it’s understandable, I guess, when I get frustrated with the spreadsheet experience in Google Docs. It’s not the same. It’s working in the web browser, and it’s just not as efficient as a desktop application.

However, this frustration disappears quickly when the power of working on web apps in the browser slaps you in the face. I’m a positive person (for the most part) so let’s not dwell on the negative. Here are the high points of using Google Apps (many of which are applicable for any cloud-based suite like Zoho or MS Office).

In-App Collaboration

You can be in the same document with another user making real-time changes while watching them happen on-screen. Users can even share real-time highlighting. It’s better, at times, than sitting next to each other collaborating on a document because you both have your hands on a keyboard and don’t have to squint to see the screen.

You may ask, “How do you track changes if you’re constantly stepping on each other?” Well, you’re not really stepping on the other’s toes if you’re a thoughtful collaborator. Even if you’re a bully though, Google Docs constantly saves versions of your spreadsheet, so you can go back and grab whichever one you want. And I have the feeling that change-tracking is right around the corner.

Proximity

Stay with me for this one because it’s not immediately evident. Here it is: Having the spreadsheet in proximity to your email program is invaluable. I use email in the browser 99% of the time; so that means to open a Google spreadsheet, I don’t have to leave the app. It’s right there, I can just click a bookmark or a link. Heck, if I’m in Gmail I can preview a Google Doc right in the email. I can also search docs and email within the same search query and have the results roll up together. It’s powerful.

You may ask, “John, c’mon, how hard is it to open another app?” Well, not hard for us Finance folks. But if you want a non-spreadsheet user to enter some data or look at some information in a spreadsheet, not having to open another app makes things a lot easier. I know a lot of sales people who simply will not open an Excel attachment because double-clicking on it takes a few extra steps, or they hit save and can’t find their downloads folder, or they’re on a different computer (or iPad) without Excel. Having the spreadsheet in the cloud opens a whole new avenue for data collection and distribution when non-Finance people are involved.

Portability

Things are getting more portable, for sure. Most people have moved on from memory keys and are using something like Dropbox, a VPN, or a Sharepoint server. But these are not as portable as just finding a web browser, logging in, and having your docs right there. And unlike Dropbox or VPN, you are working on the live document in the cloud, so there is no syncing.

Additionally, portability does not come at the expense of security. The security risk is mitigated somewhat with an always-on secure connection and by using, in the case of Google at least, two-step verification. I would think of it as comparable to an email level of security

Integration

By integration, I mean that Google Docs can be integrated with other aspects of project collaboration outside of the core productivity suite. Google Apps comes with Google Sites, which is a simple, wiki-style service. Google Sites makes it very easy to embed spreadsheets, presentations, documents, and data forms in a web page right next to to-do lists, internal blogs, robust documentation, and project calendars.

This gets your company down the road towards eliminating email as the de facto project management tool. It also allows the Finance group to more efficiently integrate financial metrics with strategic plans and marketing programs, which usually have huge, non-spreadsheet components. Google Sites is a simple way to bring these disparate forms of media together for collaboration, performance management, and reporting.

For example, picture a world where a sales person finishes their budget and instead of emailing it to everybody, they post it to a website shared with others like the VP of Sales, the Sales Manager, and a Sales Analyst. This is accompanied by a notification of some sort to all parties (probably via RSS). Then questions, answers, and insights flow naturally on that website in the form of comments, notes, and other citations (video, audio). Once finished, it gets shared with Finance and integrated into the next step of the process - one version, one place to collaborate, a lot of discussion. This eliminates those long, unmanageable email strings. It could even eliminate an excruciating budget review meeting if the collaboration is robust enough. Anything we can do to eliminate burgeoning email inboxes and wasteful meetings usually translates into higher productivity and cost savings.

Conclusion

I’m only talking about the rosy stuff here folks, so don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of drawbacks to using any cloud suite that will frustrate even the most patient spreadsheet jockey. However, I’ve heard far too many people rule out working in the cloud because of a mistaken perception that it isn’t powerful enough. Cloud apps are powerful and under constant development in a competitive market occupied by established superstars like Google and Microsoft and an ever-increasing field of early stage companies.

Here’s the deal, for the reasons above, I start about every document, spreadsheet, presentation, or flowchart in Google Docs. I do this even for many spreadsheets that I know will eventually outstrip the abilities of Google Docs, because when I start bucking up against functional constraints, I’ll just pull it down into Excel and hardly miss a beat.

This will be an ongoing conversation. In fact, you’ll hear from me shortly about more of the negative aspects of web apps. Thanks for reading and please stop back soon.

The Dutch appear to be way ahead of the US in regards to a flexible workweek according to this NYT article about part-time work in the Netherlands. They are struggling with it for sure, but I think we struggle with it a bit more here in the US.

We’ve all seen the concept of flex-time (I’ll work until midnight before my day off) and part-time (I only work three 13-hour days) degrade into something unproductive. This is especially noticeable in the world of accounting, finance, and controllership. By nature, flex-time is difficult for accounting and finance departments for a couple of big reasons:

• A certain amount of presence is required for recurring monthly/quarterly closing deadlines and the myriad of budgets, forecasts, and long-term planning presentations. I just heard of a large Chicago company who is eliminating laptops as they came off lease and replacing them with desktops, virtually guaranteeing that every accounting person will be shackled to their desk for the first 10 days of every month.
• Finance groups are organized into data and skill set silos that cause bottlenecks when the only person who can complete a certain technical function is not in the office. Cross-training and preparing documentation are activities that don’t get done in the face of staff cuts meaning that a lot of process knowledge is locked up between the ears finance types.

So we (finance people) have natural and functional reasons that make a creative workweek difficult. The solution is not so simple and is more complicated than cross-training, increased attentiveness to documentation, and issuing laptops and smartphones.

I’ve seen organizations where flex-time works, and they have the following basic traits:

• Company norms and written guidelines for general items like data structures, file names, and spreadsheet templates. This is not process documentation. In fact, these basic guidelines have to be in place before process documentation like flow diagrams and audit checklists are complete. In some cases, if the guidelines are comprehensive and arrived at collaboratively, they will obviate need for process documentation anyhow.
• A knowledge management plan and collaborative way to share notes and information. Sales forces use CRM software and science and engineering departments have tried-and-true note taking methods understood by their colleagues. But finance departments, in general, make little effort at knowledge management. If they do, they usually end up using poorly formatted Microsoft Word documents that aren’t shared and don’t adhere to any sort of departmental policy (if there is even a policy).
• Constructive relationships with the Information Technology (IT) department. The local IT support is going to be a fount of knowledge for both of the above items. They should be included in policy decisions on guidelines and norms. Any stalemate with the IT department will directly impact the finance department’s ability to be flexible.
• A flex-time planning document. This is a document focused on just how your department is going to manage the flex-time. It stops right above the process level and focuses on the monitoring and management of the functions that are subject to flex.

If these items are in place, your finance and accounting department will have a much better chance of building a work environment where nobody feels shackled to their desks during certain parts of the month.

I’ll go into this stuff in more detail and use the tag flexible to denote all related posts.

A lot of things need to be in place for an engagement to be a raging success. When I say raging success, I’m talking about a home run; the type where the client can’t stop talking about how great the consultant was and the consultant never felt like it was work because it was so much darn fun.

Sure, proper planning, subject knowledge, and management buy-in are all important. But I want to focus on an aspect of successful projects that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. I’ve found that every raging success requires the presence of an on-site champion with the warrior spirit to get the project done. When I say on-site champion, I’m not talking about the manager who hired us. I’m also not talking about the CEO, who’s probably on board with the manager. I’m talking about a full-timer in the trenches who will be intimately involved with the project when Steffen Consulting is long gone.

This will probably be the on-site staffer who handles most of the transition.  In our engagement section we attempt to make the point about how much we care about the transition. The transition is a perfect barometer for how smoothly the project went. It’s a measure of how much we understood the underlying issue, how well we documented things, and how user-friendly we made the interface. This is helped along greatly if there is someone on-site with whom we can partner throughout the process to hammer out the gritty details.

The transition is also a measurement of our people skills. All of the knowledge, technical skills, and planning don’t matter if the client and the on-site champion can’t relate to each other. We know how tough it is to have a consultant in who asks questions, suggests changes, and pulls staff from their regular jobs. At Steffen Consulting we’ve negotiated this hurdle many times. We get over it by listening, by empathizing, by being patient, and by paying attention to the client’s corporate culture.

Be sure, we take as much pride in our soft skills as we do in our hard skills. Cultivating a great working relationship with the on-site champion and other members of the client staff is just as important as exchanging technical knowledge. We rely on both of these often disparate skill sets to get the job done right. We value each client relationship highly, but we pay special attention to the relationship with the on-site champion and work with all of our clients to identify this aspect of the engagement early in the process.

I work a lot with Google Docs and I’m becoming increasingly interested in web apps. The idea of using Microsoft Office in the cloud, through the browser, is very powerful and I think it will eventually have a huge effect on finance departments. It’s only a matter of time so I’m trying to get out in front of it.

I will talk about this more and I’ve begun preparing a post on how valuable a well thought-out Google spreadsheet and web form can be for data collection and analysis. Until I finish that, here is a great post from Mary Jo Foley discussing the state of Office Web Apps. As some background, Ms. Foley reports mostly on enterprise issues relating to Microsoft. However, she purchased an iPad about a month ago (her first Apple product ever) and appears somewhat smitten by it. She’s a must read if you’re interested in keeping up with what Microsoft is doing for the enterprise.

Building great spreadsheets entails a lot of software-specific knowledge. For example, to create a solid Excel spreadsheet, it’s important to have at least a working knowledge of the capability of functions and macros. This series of posts, however, will not delve into that type of detail. Instead, we are going to take a step back and talk about spreadsheet philosophy.

Philosophically, it’s useful to think of building spreadsheets the same way a coder thinks of writing a computer program. Hardcore programmer concerns like debugging, documentation, maintenance, and speed are also concerns for preparers of big, important spreadsheets. A spreadsheet superstar should approach their trade in much the same way a coder does, by using the Unix Philosophy.

Unix is a famous computer operating system which provides the underpinning for many of the worlds most useful and reliable programs. The basic tenants of the Unix Philosophy are directly applicable to great spreadsheets. Here are a few Unix principles from the Wikipedia site that we will expand upon more in this blog:

• Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces (modularity)
• Store data in flat text files
• Small is beautiful
• Fail noisily

Don’t worry, we are going to give specific examples for each of these (and when we do, we’ll be sure to put hyperlinks in the list above). Regardless, even if you don’t care how the Unix Philosophy relates to spreadsheets, it’s great reading for anyone working on any type of process flow.