Accountability the ‘No. 1 thing’ and other reflections from Bill Reeb

In this episode, former AICPA Chair Bill Reeb, CPA/CITP, CGMA, reflects on more than 40 years in the profession and why he believes accountability is the starting point for a successful leadership effort.

Reeb, speaking from the Digital CPA Conference in December, discusses how momentum, clarity of direction, and facing fear help leaders navigate today’s rapid pace of change. He also addresses technological shifts including the rise of artificial intelligence and explains why a book he wrote about succession planning was not predominantly about succession.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Reeb’s view of CPAs’ unlimited career possibilities.
• What he and his wife learned on a shopping trip about 40 years ago.
• Why momentum, facing fear, and embracing change are essential elements of strong leadership.
• How accountability supports effective change management and keeps teams aligned on strategy.
• How rapid technological shifts have created higher standards but not necessarily time savings.
• Why the answer to “What is Bill Reeb’s succession plan?” is complicated.

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 recording at Digital CPA in National Harbor, Md. It’s late December. We’re planning publication of this episode in early 2026. My guest today, former AICPA Chair Bill Reeb. Bill, we’re glad to have you on the podcast. Thanks for making time.

Bill Reeb: Any time.

Amato: I’m going to start with this. How many years have you been a CPA?

Reeb: Now you’re trying to make me do math. Math is always tough. I guess 40 something? Became a CPA in 1986.

Amato: Yeah, that’s 40 years.

Reeb: I was a late bloomer because I went to work for IBM first, and then I started a consulting company. While I was doing that work, every time I turned around — it was a lot of technology work back then — and they needed to have these people come in that carried a CPA license to look over my work. I was developing like a job-cost system for Westinghouse or a product-tracking system for Abbott Laboratories or whatever, and I was managing programmers to do that. Back then, I said, “You’re going to have who come look at my work?” They said, “Well, these are our CPAs.” They’d come in and say, “Well, I don’t know what you do and I don’t know anything about it.” I said, “I want that job. I want the job that the trust is so high that even if they don’t know what the topic is, their opinion is still valuable.”

Amato: So you make that decision in the mid-’80s. Why do you like it? Why did you stick with it?

Reeb: Because you can do anything you want as a CPA. I remember as chair when I would go into various schools and I would talk about the CPA profession and where we’re going and what we have the flexibility to do, I just tell them. I said, “There’s nothing you can’t do as a CPA, nothing. From CEO to any other job. If you name a job, any job, I can find you a CPA that does it.” How many other professions let you do anything? I know of no one. I think it’s the greatest flexibility to do whatever you want, whatever your passion is because once you speak the language of accounting, you can better do a manufacturing job, you can better do a construction job, you can better do a people management job. You can do any job when you have that piece of the puzzle. Now, you have to have more than that piece. But that’s really a big foundation piece.

Interestingly enough, many times as I’m coaching leaders, they get scared of the numbers, and so they try to stay away from some of that because they feel like you’re going to see that I’m trying to fake it till I make it, and I don’t want to show you that weakness. The reality is because of that background, it gives you the confidence to step into almost any situation and do a really good job.

Amato: It’s interesting. I didn’t share any of these topics with you in advance, but you’re leading me nicely into my next two without even knowing it, so I love that. You have lived that in your working career. You’ve founded a diverse array of businesses. We can talk about some of those if you’d like, but I’d like to ask this, how did you land on your current business, The Succession Institute?

Reeb: Well, it’s like so many things, an evolution. The businesses I have started, I just would say they’re just going through the path of life. I remember the first ladies’ clothing store we started, my wife and I. She was with IBM, I was with IBM at the time, and she made a comment one day to me. She said, “I just can’t find business clothes.” I defaulted to the typical man answer, which is, well, you just like to shop, so you’re just trying to extend the shopping. I said, “I hunt when I go out.” I hunt and I kill every time. So if I’m looking for a suit, I go out, find it, I buy it, and I come home. I said, “You’re telling me that you want the experience to shop,” and I said, “I’ll shroud that if you want, the fact that you can’t find anything.” She said, “Then come with me.” I spent all day with her.

With women’s clothing at the time, there were virtually no suits. If they talked about professional women’s wear, they were talking about the wrong profession. When they looked at the fabrics, you might find something that was totally inappropriate fabric for something like IBM, and even when you found it, you couldn’t find it in her size.

I said, “Well, hell, then, if that’s the way it is, we’ll just start our own business.” We started Suited For Success, which was a business focused on women’s clothing. We did not get to be the first in the world, we were second behind Streets & Co. in New York. But when we started Suited For Success, there was no such thing in a department store or in any business called professional women’s clothing. When I went to market, I was told by all the major manufacturers, this will not stick. It’s not long term, it’s not sustainable, women in business is a passing fad. You are not going to be able to sustain this business. Now, you can’t go anywhere in any business and not find a department for professional women’s clothing.

So many things like that when I started the software business, and that was back when you would buy software through retail. I knew software was important, and I certainly was involved in development of software, so I said, I’m going to start a business. I bought a franchise out of Teaneck, N.J. All of these things that happened to us were because there was an opportunity that came along and I just said, “Well, I have an unlimited amount of time in my life.” I have 24 hours a day, so I used all of them. I just did that. I woke up one day and I said, “Wow, I don’t have time to breathe because I’m still working full time, and I’m doing four other businesses simultaneously.” I just said, “I’ve got to change that.” So that started the beginning of a simplification process, which has been a big deal to me, too.

Amato: You also mentioned coaching leaders, so that’s what I was going to ask you. What do you like about coaching leaders specifically?

Reeb: I’ve been doing it for a long time, and so many places I go, I will have someone come up that’s gone through leadership classes I’ve taught and said, “You’re the reason why I’m here. You’re the reason why I started my own firm. You’re the reason why I got to that next place.” I really wasn’t the reason. I was just more helping them go through their own logic of why they were stuck.

I would just tell you, most people allow fear to be their biggest barrier when, in fact, whatever is scaring you is likely going to be exactly what happens to you because your choices will become more and more limited trying to avoid the fear rather than face the fear. That’s a big part of what I teach in leadership. The other part I teach in leadership is that momentum is really important. Do something, and if you don’t like it, do something different. Constantly change directions. That’s OK because momentum is your friend and stagnation is your enemy. Stop being scared that something will happen.

Because we tend to look at a scenario and we say, if I do this, then I’m either going to win everything or I’m going to lose everything. It rarely is that. It’s almost always in the middle, and you do something and if it works, great, if it doesn’t work, you’ll modify, that probably will work. If that doesn’t work, then you’ll modify. Life is about the journey, not about the destination. As long as you’re on a journey, you will be very happy in your course. As long as you learn to appreciate the journey. If you get so focused on the destination, you’ll be dissatisfied most of the time.

Amato: On the topic of the journey, your session at Digital CPA has the title “Leadership for Our Changing Times: Strategy and Change Management.” Is the journey going faster these days or has the pace of change always been fast, just maybe in a different way? What do you think?

Reeb: I think Pascal Finette has done so many sessions for us with CPA.com and the AICPA, and he had a graphic once that showed the exponential pace of technology. It looked like a straight line with an upward slant until probably the ’50s or ’60s, and then it’s been straight up since then. Technology has been exponential since the plow. It’s been getting more and more leverageable, more and more power in the technology. We’ve been on a pace of change.

Technology is speeding up change, there’s no question about that. But as tools become more effective, then we don’t lower the standards, we raise the standards, which means that competition now requires more. I remember when I was speaking, probably in the ’70s, one of the major topics I’d speak on was all of the change in technology, what it was expected to do, how it was going to change our lives. A major topic back then was, what are we going to do with all the leisure time? Because part of the prediction was that the average human would work 20 hours a week and they’d have all this leisure time. How is that going to affect the leisure business? How would that affect the travel business? How would that affect how people can make money, etc.?

It just tickles me because as we invest more and more and more in us, we don’t get that time off. We have to do more to justify the fact that competitors are now enabled and they’re going to do more. I use as my example, 30 years ago, it took me 45 minutes to write a letter. Today, with at least $100,000 worth of technology invested in me, it takes 45 minutes to write a letter.

So why wouldn’t I have picked up any speed? Well, because back then it didn’t matter if the margins didn’t work, it didn’t matter if I made typos, it didn’t matter if I misspelled stuff, it didn’t matter if I used the same phrase at the beginning of each sentence. Nothing that mattered.

But as technology improved, spelling started to matter, having more of a quality look to the letter mattered. Having nuances to that letter where you’re making sure you don’t start them all the same or you don’t use the same adverbs, whatever it is, the standards kept raising. What it takes to put out a letter today is a much higher-quality letter than it was, because 25 years ago nobody cared because nobody was making quality letters.

We didn’t save time with letters. It’s not like a letter takes five minutes. Now, with AI, letters are taking a lot less time because they’re writing them for you. But I can also tell you the minute you start saying, well, AI will just write it, here’s three thoughts, and you don’t spend the time to proof it, you may be sending out stuff you don’t want to send out because it will make up whatever it wants to make up.

Amato: It will, and it might take 45 seconds instead of 45 minutes, but you’re still going to spend the time proofing it, and you have to.

Reeb: You have to because, otherwise, you do what so many people have learned. They start trusting AI to the point that whatever it comes up with, they just hand it in. And we’ve seen lawsuits and we’ve seen all kinds of things happen where somebody said, “Wait a second, didn’t you proof that?” Well, interestingly enough, we’re trying to push AI down to someone without the experience to know whether AI is right or wrong, and that’s a dangerous position. I’m not saying that it’s not great, because it is, but I’m saying every tool is just that. It’s a tool that needs to be used by somebody who knows how to use it.

Amato: Touching on some of the notes in your session’s description, what would you say are the requirements and components of a good change management process?

Reeb: Accountability is the No. 1 thing. But as I talked about in the session, you still have to start with fundamentals. For example, I’ve got to have a strategy. I can’t hold somebody accountable if we don’t agree to where we’re going. So many people want to skip that. They just want to go straight to implementing. Well, the problem with implementing as soon as you start getting to the hard parts, you start getting resistance. When you get to resistance, you have to have a way to pull everybody together and say, “Wait a second. We talked about this and we agreed that this is our destination. If this is our destination, here’s the path we chose. Get back on the bus or get off the bus.” But if you go straight to implementation, where I can hold you accountable, and we don’t have that agreement, it will fall apart as soon as the going gets tough because that resistance will unravel the direction.

Amato: Do you think leaders today have more to deal with in going through their change management initiatives than they did 30 years ago?

Reeb: I think we’ve always had complex situations. We’re in the people business, and people have always been complex. Now, technology makes things different because we have so much additional communication going on that we don’t know about. It’s just a far more dynamic environment, but change management is about people, people is about letting them understand what we’re trying to do, where we’re going, why it’s beneficial to them, what they get out of it, and as soon as they understand that, they’ll decide to stay or go and it’s always been that way.

Back in my dad’s era, we had unbridled loyalty, which says, “I joined you, I’m going to stay here until I die.” We haven’t had that for decades, and we’ll never see that again. It’s not that the people, the workers, have no loyalty; the owners showed no loyalty as well. When going got tough, we just started firing people and making those kind of calls. I’m not saying anybody did anything wrong, but we are today where we are because everyone did something.

You go back to the leadership discussion. I tell everybody when we start, “Every single thing you do right, you have a lot to do with that. Everything that isn’t working, is your fault, your fault. You are part of it. You may not be all of it, but you are to blame for that, and you need to accept that responsibility. If you want change, you have to recognize where you need to change, and you need to recognize how you need to be more accepting or realize that there’s more ways to do things than you think.” Over and over, I don’t think that yes, it’s more complicated. I think change management is what it’s always been. Where are we going? Why are we going there? What direction are we going to take? What are the steps we’re going to take, and who’s responsible by when, and change happens.

Amato: The name of your business obviously shows that succession is something you discuss often. What is Bill Reeb’s succession plan?

Reeb: That’s a tougher question which I’ll get to in a minute. But I will tell you the first book I wrote for —well, it’s not true. The second book I wrote for the AICPA was on succession. When they called me and said, “Would you write something on succession?” This was early on. I said, “I will,” but I said, “I’ll only write it under one condition that succession is not the main topic.” I said, “Succession is easy when you do the other things to run a business.”

Succession is really difficult if you’re doing the wrong things and you wait till the last minute to say, “Wow, this is not sustainable.” Well, no kidding, you aren’t doing sustainable things. You are looking at short-term efficiency, you’re looking at where you’re trying to go without investing in tomorrow. We have so many companies that are not investing in their people and training them well, and then they say, “Well, I can’t push work down to anybody.” Well, guess what? You didn’t train them. Over and over, when you start looking at succession, good succession is a byproduct of doing the right things all the time.

I said to them, which was PCPS: “If you conceptually take five chapters, the last one will be on succession. The first four will be about running the business, because succession is easy when I have those pieces in place.”

Now, when you talk about succession for me, that’s a different story. There are lots of ways, and I talk about it in our books about how people want to retire. I love what I do. I have passion about what I do. I plan on doing it for a while. I’ve got multiple partners. I have people trying to join us. I’m also working really closely with CPA.com because I may pass some of the function because we’re working closely together to help CPA.com take on some of the roles that I take on.

I’m looking at multiple ways to move forward. But what I want to do is make sure that we are providing a skill set and providing our CPAs with a way to go through change management and a way to be successful long term. I’m not trying to build a value that I can sell. I’m trying to build something that can be sustainable for the profession. That’s why I became chair. It’s why I’ve spent 30 years volunteering. To me, it’s about the sustainability of our profession.

Amato: Your passion for the profession is clear, so thank you. Thanks for being on the JofA podcast.

Reeb: Thank you for having me.