Ric Payne – Ric Payne's Blog: The Consulting Accountant

Why People Quit: Understanding Employee Resignations

Lack of employee engagement is the precursor to resignation. Gallup’s 2024 global workplace survey of employee engagement reveals that only 23% are engaged, 62% are not engaged, and 15% are actively disengaged. Expressed another way, 77% of employees would prefer to be somewhere else.

What is Strategy?

Strategy is the implicit or explicit articulation of a deliberate set of adaptive choices made in a volatile, ambiguous, and uncertain environment about where to play and how to improve the odds of successfully accomplishing a purposeful goal having regard to the availability of resources, core competencies, and the culture and management processes of a complex organization.

Enhancing Decision-Making with Evidence-Based Management

CEO’s who possess what I call Confident Humility are naturally lifetime learners. They welcome the opportunity to challenge and be challenged and for the most part, at least in my experience, are great to work with not only because they are good learners, they are also great teachers. Being a business advisor is a fantastic opportunity to teach, to learn, to have fun, and to feel you’ve made a difference i.e. it’s good for the bank, the mind, and the soul.

Rethinking The Innovator’s Dilemma: Should It Be Called The Incumbent’s Dilemma?

6 Minute audio

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma is a modern classic in business literature, shedding light on why successful companies often fail in the face of disruptive innovations. The book’s central insight is as paradoxical as it is profound: the very practices that make companies great can also lead to their downfall when the rules of the game change.

The Rapture of the Nerds

3 Minute Audio

In 2017 I was anxious to better understand how artificial intelligence was likely to impact the way we work so I bought and read Jerry Kaplan’s (a Stanford Professor) book “Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone needs to know.” The following paragraph in the final chapter jumped out at me when I re-read the second sentence today.

The challenge when advising early stage business founders in mature markets

Audio 4 minutes

There is a reason why SMEs stay SMEs or disappear completely often leaving shareholders with little or nothing, creditors with unrecoverable losses, employees looking for jobs, and families struggling to weather the storm of failure and bankruptcy.

Your strategic goal may meet the SMART criteria but is it the SMARTEST framework for developing a strategy?

The popular acronym for goal setting is SMART which typically stands for:

Unlocking the Power of Communication

In an increasingly interconnected world, effective communication is more important than ever. Yet, despite the many ways we can communicate, for many people—including myself—a significant gap remains between merely hearing what someone says and truly understanding them.

Some thoughts on Consolidation and Private Equity Investment

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s there was a lot of activity in the accounting services sector as the rules relating to ownership of firms were being relaxed to allow non-accountants to own equity in firms. The accounting services sector was then (and now!) highly fragmented which presented an opportunity for consolidation, owners of firms were ageing and many were thinking about retirement at a time when the next generation of prospective owners were not showing much interest in partnership, and the competitive landscape was becoming more intense dues in large part to a somewhat disruptive impact of technology and other things.

You’ll be a better leader if you subscribe to these tenets of intellectual honesty

I once read, and copied, a statement about intellectual honesty I thought was excellent and worth sharing. It was issued by a university (I think Harvard) as a condition when registering for a course I did that. I have lost the original source so if you recognize the wording please let me know. This is the document, slightly edited by me to put it into the context of organizational leadership.