ThinkTWENTY20

The UK’s Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has published a thought-leadership piece, A Matter of Principles: The Future of Corporate Reporting.[1] Does it portray the future of corporate reporting as you see it? Comments are due by February 5, 2021.

Before I start in my thoughts on the paper here, I wanted to tell you (remind you) of a vision of the future that has stuck with me for a very long time. It was first presented to me at an AICPA technology conference by perennial keynote speaker Dana R. (Rick) Richardson, who strongly contributed to my own presentation style.

In 1987, Apple Inc. produced a video[2] about the interactive, personal future of computers, known as the “Knowledge Navigator.” Thirty-three years later, it is fascinating to compare and contrast the vision as detailed in the epilogue to John Sculley’s Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple with Apple’s product direction and the rest of the industry.

The video illustrates a college professor, with a (foldable) iPad-sized device (many years before the iPad and six years before the release of the ill-fated Newton). He speaks to it as a person to a person, with no need for a keyboard, and it manages his time, his communications, his contacts, and his data – concepts that look and sound like the World Wide Web (“I’ll send you a link”) years before Sir Tim made the Web possible. It is at the same time still far more advanced with its human-computer interaction “Bill Nye the Science Guy”-like know-it-all digital assistant who is conversationally savvy and corrects the professor mid-sentence, while being anchored to a desk and not part of a personal experience. Of course, there was no WIFI in 1987, no smart phones.

If you were creating the “Corporate Reporting Navigator,” what would your video look like?

[1]  https://www.frc.org.uk/getattachment/cf85af97-4bd2-4780-a1ec-dc03b6b91fbf/Future-of-Corporate-Reporting-FINAL.pdf.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0.