Technology, consolidation, and changing expectations expose weaknesses in business strategies.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

Accountants help clients plan for growth, manage risk, and prepare for uncertainty. But what happens when they turn that same scrutiny on their own firms?

The answers may be uncomfortable.

In this episode of Accounting Voices, reflections from 48 interviews conducted in late 2025 reveal a recurring concern: The profession’s ability to solve other people’s business problems does not always translate into a willingness to confront its own.

• MORE Accounting Voices with Rob Brown
  
  

The discussion centers on a deceptively simple question: What changes your thinking about accounting? Across conversations with firm leaders, technology specialists, coaches, consultants, and others, familiar assumptions begin to unravel — about who should run a firm, what makes advisory services valuable, and how much protection technical expertise actually provides.

One challenge, attributed in the episode to leadership and organizational development specialist Alice Gray Harrison, brings the issue into sharp focus: If your firm were your client, would you fire yourself for lacking a five-year strategic plan?

It is a question that makes the episode less a reflection on the past than a test of what leaders are willing to change now.