Summer surfing reminders to avoid a transformation wipeout

“It feels like we were out at sea. We got washed overboard by a big wave and we’re floating around in life vests, and wave after wave of transformation is washing over us.”

Those were the words of a corporate finance leader a few years back to Tom Hood, CPA/CITP, CGMA, executive vice president–Business Growth & Engagement for the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.

The feeling of being knocked back by seemingly nonstop changes in the business environment is a common one — so common that it’s a recurring theme for a group of finance leaders Hood formed about five years ago.

In this episode, Hood explains more about the “learn to surf” mantra and the top challenges facing finance leaders today. In a December JofA podcast appearance, he summarized the fourth Future of Finance Summit.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The best way to handle the “intense” waves of transformation.
• How a philosopher’s words have helped Hood and colleagues work with hundreds of corporate finance teams on transformation.
• Some of Hood’s favorite summer leisure activities.
• The top challenges facing finance leaders.
• His advice for creating more engaging LinkedIn posts.
• A shout-out to a retiring colleague.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I’m not sure he’s taking any surfing lessons, but Tom Hood is someone talking a lot these days about riding waves. For those who don’t know him, Tom is executive vice president–Business Growth & Engagement at the Association.

He’s my colleague, and it’s become a midsummer tradition on the JofA podcast to have him on the show. We’re continuing to build on that tradition with Tom Hood. Tom, welcome back. Thanks for being here.

Tom Hood: Neil, awesome to be here as always, so I’m excited to be doing this with you.

Amato: Great. Recently on the podcast, upcoming conference keynote speaker Al Dea joined me to talk about dealing with change. We brought up your name and that phrase I mentioned in the intro, one you’ve been using for at least the past several months and probably longer, the “waves of change” and how they are constant and how they relate to the finance profession. Tell me what you mean when you say, “waves of change.”

Hood: This phrase came from a conversation with a big global Fortune 100 company. We were talking to their finance team, who is leading this transformation. They said, Tom, it feels like we were out at sea. We got washed overboard by a big wave and we’re floating around in life vests, and wave after wave of transformation is washing over us.

I said, I hear you because you’re a whole lot of other finance professionals these days in corporate. The waves of transformation are intense. I said, there’s a favorite quote of mine. I think it comes from a philosopher named Jon Kabat-Zinn, who said, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.”

We took that up as our mantra. When we do intros to finance teams, we literally set it up as these are the waves of transformation coming at you based on the trends, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, all those pieces. Then we segue to how are you going to learn how to ride them and not let them crash over you. We’ve got a whole piece of research that we call “mindset, skill set, tool set.”

If you start working on the mindset — growth mindset, collaboration — get going on skill set, curiosity, problem-solving, strategic thinking, then you’ll be able to ride that technology and deploy it in a much, much more sane manner and keep your team together. That’s how we’ve been talking to, I want to say by now, probably several hundred big finance teams and helping them deal with this level of transformation.

Amato: More specifically about some of those finance leaders, finance teams, in just a bit. But when you’re not dealing with all this transformation yourself or talking to other profession leaders about it, what about your free time, your vacation time? Doing anything fun, or have you done anything recently fun?

Hood: Well, a couple things. One thing we love to do, we’re down here on Baltimore’s harbor, and our neighbors, who are a couple of floors above us, have a great boat. I can see it out my window. They’ll often pick us up and go across the Chesapeake Bay here, find a good crab house, and eat crabs on the deck, and then come back across the bay in the boat and land back here on our promenade. That’s always fun. That’s a thing we do a couple of times during the summer.

The other piece is our grandchild. We have a new grandchild who happens to be across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, so we drive over there to meet up with them and see that little guy. Carter James is his name.

I think the third one would be, I’m a farm hand on the side with my wife, who runs a school farm. Getting out there on a weekend and figuring out the chickens and the turkeys and being out in nature, helping harvest or plant, that’s just like a nice — I don’t know if I’d say it’s relaxing — but it really does send you in your own space. You don’t have anything bothering you, takes your mind off everything, and it’s for a good cause. Those would be three major things.

Amato: That’s great. Anyone who follows Tom on social media probably knows Farmer Hood, who’s equally famous.

Hood: Yes, my wife.

Amato: Exactly. It’s not you. It is your wife. You are the farm hand and a good one, I’m sure.

Now, the annual in-person Future of Finance Summit is each December. If I’m counting right, upcoming this year in Denver is the fifth one. But I know at other times of the year you get together at least online, if not in person, in smaller groups with the Future of Finance Leadership Advisory Group. Tell the audience again who comprises that group and also what some of their recent discussion points have been about.

Hood: This group literally is going to be five years old. It started right after I first started with the AICPA and CIMA. The idea was to put together a group of progressive finance leaders, CPAs, CGMAs, etc., to help us understand what the future of finance was going to look like coming out of the pandemic. Now, that was five years ago.

Actually, the group has stayed together because, back to those waves of transformation, every time we get together, there’s another set of things that are like, oh my God, we’ve got to deal with inflation or tariffs or gen AI, you name it. Those, in fact, are a bunch of the issues that keep coming.

I’m shocked and really pleasantly surprised that they’ve stayed with us for five years. We’ve had a couple leave, get promoted, a couple new ones. But we have about 55 and growing, actually, major corporate CFOs, controllers, investor-relations types, all senior finance leaders. For the most part, Fortune 100 or up to 500. There are also some private companies. We don’t discriminate based on size. It’s about being progressive and wanting to be part of this — I call it my tribe. That group gets together every other month on Zoom, once a year in person. We’re getting ready to go to Durham to our headquarters next month. Then they help us plan this summit at the end of the year in December that you’ve been part of. That’s the group.

The things we’re talking about, we keep going over the top issues. Right now, they’re centering around gen AI, the need for new skills as a result of gen AI, digital transformation, another big one. Interesting enough, another one came up was innovation and growth. Then lower on that is cost optimization. In spite of inflation and tariffs, which are down there in the top issues somewhere, they’ve taken an approach of trying to figure out, how do we become more innovative in finance to help the organization deal with all these transition pieces and not have to go down into layoffs and cost cutting?

They’re looking at finance being a value creator, which is really exciting. It’s what we’ve been saying in all our research for the last 10 years. But now we’re seeing tangible examples that it’s actually happening. That’s what we’re talking about and what’s exciting about it.

Amato: A great intro for those who don’t know and a recap for those who do what’s been going on lately. Again, that Future of Finance Summit in December [is] in Denver.

Shifting gears a little bit to LinkedIn. You’re viewed, I think, correctly, based on the number of followers, as a key influencer on that site. Your posts get substantial interaction from in and outside the accounting profession. Would you like to give a little LinkedIn primer, maybe some advice on how to write a good LinkedIn post? How to grow that audience as you have over the years?

Hood: Sure. I’ll be glad to do that. I like to say, even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes. I was very lucky to be early in on social media. What I find fascinating is what I use it for, believe it or not, I use it for learning. When I’m connected to people on LinkedIn, I pay attention to what they’re doing and saying, and often I will share that, or I look for pieces that connect to or link to the things that we’re seeing and we’re working on, like our Future of Finance stuff.

You’ll see a whole lot and using a hashtag. Here’s a couple of tips. Use a hashtag, so people can identify your content and actually follow that link on LinkedIn. So, #futureoffinance, all one word, would be one of the ones where you’ll find a lot of our content.

I think the biggest thing is, and I would say this gets back to learning, is to make sure you’re giving your point of view. It’s not cool just to like things and share things that don’t have any of your POV on it. You want to start talking about why you think what Neil said resonated with you or didn’t resonate with you, and you would still give a compliment to it. “Hey, Neil, this is a great thought, and I would add this to it.” I think it’s about having conversations on LinkedIn because you’re exchanging some really good ideas with people.

I think you want to think about it conversationally and not worry about the likes or any of that stuff. No one cares what you write except for you. You should care what you’re writing, and you should care about what are people doing and sharing about. That tells me it’s resonating. That’s what I would say.

I think it’s point of view, two other tips, hashtag we talked about, and the other one is tag people that you mention. If I’m going to write a post talking to you about this podcast, I would say “@NeilAmato.” When you say “@,” then LinkedIn usually fills in the name. Sometimes the wrong name, so you might want to double-check it. But you find the right name, click it, so that way, Neil gets notified. That’s where the viral piece comes because Neil will see that I mentioned him, you’ll probably like that. That will go to all your followers, and that’s where this whole social amplification deal comes in.

Amato: I think that’s good. I think you’re also not afraid to try new things. I know you talked a lot about listening and responding and reading what other people say, but you’re someone who’s out there like, “Hey, we’re doing LinkedIn Live,” and it doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be rehearsed. It’s just like, “Hey, let’s record on this topic. Let’s go.”

Hood: Exactly.

Amato: That’s important and not everyone wants to try that.

Hood: Well, so I’ll give you the last tip, people still baffle me. They all call me the selfie king because I love to put selfies out there. Interestingly enough, a selfie will get more likes from people than any professionally done photograph of a group. It’s scary. But why is that? Because it’s authentic.

Usually, people are smiling, and it’s like it says you’re real. That’s what people love — authenticity and real. That means it doesn’t all have to be slick, and you don’t have to have a big background and all that stuff. You can just go out there and have a conversation like we’re doing right now. That’s what counts.

Amato: That’s great. The selfie example is true. Definitely, people love a good selfie, and when you’ve had a lot of practice like you have, then they pretty much all turn out great. Speaking of LinkedIn, the Journal of Accountancy has just launched a weekly LinkedIn newsletter. We’ll include that resource in our list of links in the show notes for this episode. Please give us a follow, the new Journal of Accountancy Weekly on LinkedIn.

Tom, what else is top-of-mind topic for you as of this recording — again, middle of July 2025?

Hood: I just got back from South Africa where I met with our CIMA South Africa team, and we did two major sessions there — one with a group of our influencer members in Johannesburg and one with the British Chamber of Commerce, their CFO group. I think very interesting is the issues that we have in the U.S. market with our group were basically the same issues they were dealing with in South Africa.

I’m going to go to India next month and check it out there. I’ve been curious to see how alike or different are we around the world. We are a global community, which is, I think, super unique. We are the largest global association in the world for accounting and finance — CPAs and CGMAs. When we start to find that common ground, it’s amazing the power and the wisdom when you get to talk about all those topics.

I’m going to be starting to write a couple of posts about what I learned in South Africa, but it just reinforced all the stuff we’ve been seeing in the U.S. market, U.K. market, you name it. I really believe we’re going to harness the power of this group as we look to the future, and that’s what’s helping us share and be prepared even more, because we use them for our interviews and research. We write white papers.

All that is the wisdom of the crowd. That’s what really excites me because there’s nothing like getting a good group of CFOs in a room and talking about what’s on their mind and then hearing what they’re doing. It’s incredible, and no one else can do it the way we can.

Amato: Anything on the U.S. market side, any update on the apprenticeship program, or anything else as a closing thought to this episode?

Hood: A couple of things. The U.S. apprenticeship is going well. It’s slow, because this profession — when I say, “Would you like to talk about apprentices?”, they say, “We don’t need electricians,” and then we have to go into the spiel. But one of my key colleagues and friends, Joanne Fiore, vice president–Pipeline & Apprenticeships, is going to be leaving us at the end of [August]. She’s actually going to retire.

She wanted to stay to make sure the program was established and running well. She did that and more. She’s been a huge, trusted member of my senior team. We’re going to miss her. I’ll make sure I put it out when this thing gets published and we throw it out on LinkedIn.

I’m going to say, make sure everybody gets on there and congratulates Joanne for her next journey in retirement. She’s amazing. She ran the Journal of Accountancy. She’s just done lots of stuff for our organization, and I was privileged to get her on my team for the last five years. I’m going to miss her. I love her, and I’m going to wish her all the best.

Amato: She was the leader of our magazine team, the publisher of the magazines. She actually was the first person I did a remote interview with. It was the last stage of my job interview — now 13 years ago, hard to believe — but my first remote interview was with Joanne Fiore. I’ll always remember that, and I will remember her contributions to both our team and the Association. We wish her well.

Tom, thank you again for being on the podcast. We will publish later this month, July 2025. Appreciate having you on.

Hood: You, too. Thank you, Neil.