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Special Issue - Thought Leadership
5/22/2009

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP FOR YOUR CHALLENGES AHEAD
Its a brave new world. The meek, those who hold firm to the old and traditional ways of leading an accounting firm, will not inherit the successes of a changing accounting profession. Business cycles ebb and flow. Firms have had it easy over the past few years, becoming order-takers rather than innovative marketers. These times demand that you be proactive. Appear complacent and clients will race to competitors who actively promise to help them through these difficult times. How well your professionals and your firm perform depends largely on how well you and your leadership team manage change. Its not simply how you manage the change you face today but how well you prepare for the changes challenges over the horizon.

Tax seasons end closes your busiest time of year, and now is your opportunity to focus on how you will manage your firm and deal with the changing client services environment. Clients are cutting back on what they perceive as discretionary services. Big 4 firms are turning back their attention to serving smaller companies. These are todays facts. How you manage them will determine how strongly your firm will be prepared when circumstances change again in a few years. Drop the ball today, and you may not have the ability to play in tomorrows game.

Where there are challenges, solutions await. Solutions lead to opportunities. In considering how we can best help you find solutions to your practice challenges and see opportunities amongst the chaos, Bowmans asked several of our professions thought-leaders to forecast your challenges ahead and suggest innovative solutions. As often as possible, they used an innovative format that allowed them to select a topic of their choice, look at the big trend, tell us the unconventional wisdom, expose the misplaced assumption, create the watch list and then make the bold prediction.

Its invigorating in these tumultuous times that these independent thinkers dont always agree. How boring if they did. How safe and lacking in imaginations would that be? Theres more than one way to solve a problem. As your firms leader, the options are yours. Embracing just one of these thought-provoking essays will make an outstanding difference in your success.

It's with heartfelt gratitude that we extend our personal thanks to Joel Sinkin, Don Scholl, Marc Rosenberg, Gerry Riskin, Terrance Putney, Jeff Pawlow, Jay Nisberg, Bob Martin, Bruce Marcus, Allan Koltin, Roman Kepczyk, Rita Keller, Bob Gallagher, Chris Frederiksen, Steve Erickson, Gale Crosley, Jean Caragher, Gary Boomer, August Aquila and Sam Allred for their thought-provoking contributions. It is because of their assistance that we can share with you this truly special issue...

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IDENTIFYING NATURAL LEADERS
The need to empower natural leaders isn't an HR pipedream, it's a competitive imperative, Gary Hamel writes in The Wall Street Journal. But before you can empower them, you have to find them.

In most firms, the formal hierarchy is a matter of record -- it's easy to discover who's in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don't appear on any organizational...

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TODAY'S THOUGHT...
General Dwight D. Eisenhower used to demonstrate the art of leadership with a simple piece of string. He'd put it on a table and say: Pull it and it'll follow wherever you wish. Push it and it will go nowhere at all. It's just that way when it comes to leading people.

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FOR THE ENTIRE STORY, more insight, analysis, commentary and news while it's still news, join the hundreds of CPAs utilizing the accounting profession's fastest-growing and most timely strategic information service, FirstAlert, Bowman's Accounting Report. It's the only accounting report written by Art Bowman, who's been analyzing and reporting on firms' peformance for more than 25 years.

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