Matuszak Blog 15.1.2005

Communicate Ideas

The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas.

The Great Profession Manifesto

Greatness comes from aspiring to high expectations and from doing what has to be done to meet them. That is the spirit that has driven the CPA profession, and it demands far more from us than merely complying with the rules set down by regulators.

And another quote:

There is one last characteristic of great professions that we must keep in mind: Great professions don’t just accept change. They don’t just embrace change. Great professions initiate change—for their own good, for the public good and for the sake of the future.

Does anybody know such a text in Polish?

The New Accounting: the Pacioli Paradigm and the Google Paradigm

Accountants must know how to find, assemble, and report data. Now, however, the conceptual basis of accounting is shifting from one of assembling numerous transactions and presenting the results in relatively fixed formats (the Pacioli paradigm) to one of selecting relevant data from a mass and directing it to the decision makers in a form that is unique and useful to them (the Google paradigm). This is a major change. Accountants become managers of information, both internally and externally. As a result, information flows are shifting from standardized reports to selective, user-prepared, customized reports and are spurring the growth of faster, data-centric technologies.
[from: Trites, G., Decline of the Age of Pacioli: The Impact of E-Business on Accounting and Accounting Education. p. 176 (authentication required)]

And here is a reference to so called paper paradigm in accounting:

The paper paradigm is a reference to today's financial reporting, which is largely shaped by the sets of rules that have been developed in order to make those documents as useful as possible to the investment community. Because people are the primary initial consumers of these documents, fixed patterns have been developed, information is presented redundantly (how many times does Cash or Net Income appear within a financial statement?), and rules to present no less or more than necessary limit what appears in a document. In a data environment, it does not matter if a fact appears within the context of the Balance Sheet or the Notes to the Financial Statements an automated system can discover and reuse the information with the same ease if it knows what to look for. A paper-paradigm report does not necessarily need to be printed on paper; it is presentation-driven, and the original source can be a PDF document, a simple text file, or an HTML representation.
(...)
XBRL can add structure and make the reporting process more automated -- something with the potential to be much better than today's paper paradigm. 
[from: Cohen, E., Compromise or Customize: XBRL's Paradoxical Power. (authentication required)]
 

Grammar vs. Immersion