Thoughts For August, 2025

I am starting a new monthly post about thoughts for the month before. I often do a month review process, but it’s kind of top level and more involved with events. It tends to not include all of the other thoughts I have during a month, however, I don’t think a more frequent posting is necessary because I don’t want to feel like I’m digging up something to write about. So, I am going to keep the weekly blog post about my life and add this new feature into the blog on a monthly basis.

Financial and Managerial Accounting Developments Versus Technological Change

What I found fascinating after my accounting MBA class was how static the managerial analysis, particularly cost and volume analyses, was when I first learned them two decades ago. What I found interesting about the financial accounting piece was how much GAAP has changed, especially in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Finally, I came to the realization that what I studied in tech is nearly irrelevant. Things like Cloud, DevOps, Scrum, APIs, and even programming languages shifted so much in the last ten years. Now we have AI changing everything else, but low and behold, what happens in accounting is pretty much the same. I also came across an article about a future dearth of accounting professionals, particularly CPAs. It is my belief that the 150 requirement killed it. If you need to do an extra year of school, why not just get an MBA and go into something with a higher threshold of compensation? And with an exam that is that difficult, why not just go to law school? Most of what happened here is an overreaction to Enron and Arthur Anderson, but you didn’t see this wholesale collapse of companies due to financial fraud, which means the problem was more particular to certain manipulative functions, of which the accountants bared the most responsibility for it, even ones who had nothing to do with it.

One thing I did enjoy about the Financial Accounting class was working through the company analysis for publicly traded companies and trying to be as critical of the reporting as I could be. I came up with some interesting insights during the process and I’m curious if that is something I could fold into my own analytical process in the future, maybe I can write about my findings just as an exercise. Of course, you always run into the problem of giving investment advice and given all of the disclaimers you see on the subject I guess that getting accused of it isn’t ideal.

Understanding, Managing, and Motivating People

My first ever management role involved a large group of data collectors for the finance division of a shipping company. I had roughly 40 people on two shifts. My current role’s responsibility includes a team with a small group of engineers and developers, and I recently realized that the smaller team is much more complicated to lead than the large team. In the larger team the work was much less complicated, most of what you had to deal with was interpersonal problems between team members and attendance issues. For the smaller team there is a much different component as they are all highly skilled and experienced members, many of which possess a lot of technical knowledge.

To further elaborate, I believe I’ve found my leadership style. I like the leadership framework that places style on a continuum of control, with authoritarian on one end and full laissez faire/do what you want. I struggled for many years to understand my style, and never had an answer until this came up during an leadership class in my MBA program. It started on one end with authoritarian, where the leader makes all of the calls without input from the team. That is not me. Then to consultative, where the leader makes the decisions but not without consulting the team for their input. Then there is collaborative, where the leader still makes the call but not without significant input from the team. Finally, there is facilitative, where the leader relies on the team’s input and tries to steer it to the best outcome. These all have their place of course, when things are moving really fast and time is of the essence, sometimes you have to be authoritative and make a decision. Then there are very complicated issues deeply affecting many people, and you have to facilitate the best response by relying on your experts. My general style is collaborative, I like bringing team members in and throwing ideas at them to get their input, to challenge them, to let them talk amongst each other, and only make decisions when they cannot come to a decision that I feel meets our criteria. Of course, this means I prefer to work with more expert, knowledgeable, and experienced groups that I can encourage to do their best work for the team.

Optimizing Physical Training The Schwarzenegger Way

Imagine being so popular that your normally unrecognizable last name is included in the spellcheck dictionary for the Chrome browser! But, I digress, I’ve been lifting weights for many years and I realized, I should probably be a little more defined than I am. I’m reading through Schwarzenegger’s autobiography and came across his thoughts on training. In it he really digs into his deep belief in focus while training, and I thought about how I really don’t focus that much when I lift, so I decided to do away with reading the news while I lifted, or browsing videos, and instead just really focus on the lift. I can report that I am seeing more definition and I’m trimming up. I’m still doing the same amount of exercises and times but I just feel stronger. I also started adding little changes to my routine that he recommends, like subtlety changing the way you lift a barbell and how small changes in degrees have different effects on the muscles. I do believe these changes are playing out. I also don’t miss much lifting sessions anymore, although I can’t muster enough energy to do more than five lifts a week, which is about 5 hours total for the week.

ETL Processes – Airflow and Docker

A huge win this week, I got Airflow to run on Docker on my PC. It was so easy to do after I watched some videos on it. There just seems like a learning curve with tech, that once you get it you’re good. It also seems like a lot of the hard technical stuff is easier to figure out with ChaptGPT. In the old days you’d have to read a manual and stab around until you figured something out, especially with database applications and networking. Now I can find out what certain buttons do without pushing them or what I’m missing on a configuration.

What is funny is the teacher of the course I am taking on Udemy works at Airflow, the same organization on the news where the CEO was caught cheating on his wife at a concert. What a small world.