Farewell Q&A as CEO: Melancon talks retirement, passion for profession

It’s no secret anymore: Barry Melancon, CPA, CGMA, is retiring as CEO of AICPA & CIMA. He was first named CEO of the AICPA nearly 30 years ago, and he leaves the now global organization with a legacy of change. His last official day is Dec. 31, and Mark Koziel, CPA, CGMA, is his successor.

In this episode of the JofA podcast, recorded earlier this week at Digital CPA in Denver, Melancon explains why he’s not counting down the days of his tenure, why there likely will be more recreation in his future, and why he expects he will “still wake up every day and think about the profession.”

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why Melancon hasn’t been counting the days until his tenure as CEO ends.
• His “stellar” assessment of how he will transition into retirement.
• His relationship over the years with incoming CEO Mark Koziel, CPA, CGMA.
• The “unsettled” nature of the world and how accountants can help.
• Why Melancon prioritized the profession and the members before thinking of the organization.
• The “humbling” messages he has received.

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 Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA recording with CEO Barry Melancon. Fairly soon, I guess that title will not apply, but nonetheless, we’re glad to have him from Digital CPA in Denver. Barry, thank you for being on.

Barry Melancon: Neil, great to be with you. Yes, soon it will be former CEO, but even that title I will wear with a lot of pride because, being in a position to work for all the people in the profession has been a great honor, humbling in many ways, and it’s just been an outstanding experience.

Amato: You were just on stage, talking with Erik Asgeirsson, and then Eric also had Mark Koziel, the incoming CEO, on stage. As your last few weeks of official tenure wind down, what are you feeling?

Melancon: There’s so many things going on. My days have been pretty full on a whole bunch of issues. A lot of things happening in Washington. I have several calls this week, and in fact, one over the weekend that’s coming up that’s dealing with some of the regulatory issues in Washington, mapping out strategies, and thinking along those lines. Being here at Digital CPA, which is a great community that really is about the client advisory services as part of the profession, which really has become one of the pillars of the profession, and it’s just marvelous to see the energy and everything that’s going into that. Then, thinking about the future and some of the things that I’m going to be doing, it’s been full. It’s not been any pause that’s happened.

Mark and I have several things scheduled for next week where we’re doing some formal introductions and things of that nature. In today’s world, you do that virtually. But we have several of those scheduled, and that’s going to go through that full week. Then, of course, we’re in the holiday week, and it’ll be a little bit slower. I just got back from literally being on the road seven out of the last eight weeks, dealing with issues that are out there, some global, some national, dealing with firms, dealing with regulators, dealing with some of the global economic issues that, as a profession, we work with.

So, it hasn’t slowed down, and people ask me, “Are you counting the days?” Literally, I have not counted days. But we planned for this for a long time, seven years. We knew this date, and it’s gone to plan and we’ve got a lot of great coverage from a transition perspective. As I am happy about the profession, I’m happy about how the organization’s transitioning, too.

Amato: Do you think you’re going to be any good at retirement?

Melancon: That’s a great question, Neil. I’m certainly not going to be stellar at retirement. It depends on, of course, how you define retirement. Certainly, I’m not going to be a person who thinks he can go play golf five days a week or something along those lines. I will be involved in a multitude of different things, including a couple of things on an international basis, some of which will be announced later and aren’t finalized and some advisory groups and some strategic activities that people have been talking to me about. There’s been way more things that people have asked me to do than I can physically do.

I think right now, I want the right mix of things that I’m doing where I can make a difference, where I have a passion and, obviously, a capability — a value, as people would say today. Then to try to balance that with enough free time to do some things that are different.

One of the things is still going to require me to do some travel on a global basis, but not the same intensity of three or four weeks at a time and things of that nature, more a few days and a week. From the standpoint of defining being good at retirement and moving off and not doing anything, no, I’m not going to be good at that.

I think the way I’m going to better judge myself at being good at retirement if I can get that balance to be reasonable. My wife has about a 45-year saying that she says: “You get married for better or for worse, but not for lunch.” That tells you a little bit about a perspective of not being in her way. We have some things on a fun basis planned as well. I think I’ll get the balance right, but it depends on how you want to define good at being retired.

Amato: It’s maybe not golf five days a week, but it may be more scheduled golf. I don’t know.

Melancon: It’ll be more golf than it has been. I have two groups of people that we do about three go-to-someplace-in-the-country-and-play-golf type of things a year. That’s six three- or four-day golf outings that for sure I’ll do with people that I’m close with. There’ll be some more. I’m a boater, Neil, and our boat is in New York, and the way I’ve boated for the last 20 years is you pick a date and let’s say you pick a date in August, but you’re picking it in February and make plans.

Well, weather is such a big issue with boating, so it doesn’t always work out. I look forward to the notion of looking at the calendar and saying, the weather is going to be good the next two days, maybe we go boating or something. That I think will be a little bit different from a scheduling perspective, and clearly golf, I think I’ll have some greater opportunities. But I think the important thing in the essence of this is, I think I have a lot of knowledge about the profession, a lot of passion. The profession is made up of incredible firms, incredible people doing amazing things, and where I can add something, I’m going to add something.

You mentioned Mark, but that comes with a real strong commitment and a personal belief that I have that I’m not going to do things that are going to get in his way. He needs to do things differently or better or whatever those decisions are in that process, that’s part of the deal. The work that I plan on doing is maybe with some firms or some people in the profession or some organizations that touch the profession as opposed to thinking my role is the same. My role will not be the same.

Amato: It’s goodbye to the CEO role, but certainly not goodbye to the profession.

Melancon: That’s well said. I don’t think people should expect that in me. I just sat on the stage here at Digital CPA [and said] somewhere along the line, somebody injected in my blood, if you will, that passion for the profession. It’s been my life. Because 30 years as CEO of the AICPA and in the later years with CIMA and, before that, seven years as the CEO in Louisiana and before that at a small firm, that’s been my career. Clearly 30 years in this role has been a tremendous honor and a tremendous responsibility, and you don’t just walk away from that, because every day, and people laugh when I say this. But literally I wake up every day thinking about the profession, and then the members and the impact on the members in the profession, and then the organization.

I never believed one time that the most important thing was the organization. The most important thing was the profession. I understood my fiduciary responsibility to the organization, but without a profession, without the men and women in the profession being successful, the organization’s not very relevant and I think I still will wake up every day and think about the profession.

Amato: Going back to Mark Koziel, how do you walk the line of giving him space to be his own brand of CEO and then also sharing your knowledge? You have 30 years of CEO knowledge to share.

Melancon: Mark worked for us for 14 years. I have mentored Mark along that way. He left for 4½ [years] and did a different job. And through that process, I didn’t encourage Mark to leave early, but then when he had an opportunity to be an international CEO with Allinial, I thought that that would help him in prospects down the road. I didn’t know for sure he would get this job, obviously.

We’ve had a strong relationship, and we’re going to have a strong relationship going forward. But at the same time, Mark needs to be his own person, and he needs to lead the organization and the profession in this role in the way that he feels appropriate.

Mark and I will have a rhythm where, if there’s some history that he thinks is important in that process, we will have that conversation, and that may or may not affect the decision that’s being made in a current time. It could, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it should, and I’ll be supportive of that process because he was going to have facts and circumstances that are going to be different than maybe the history would be.

Amato: You mentioned that passion for the profession you just feel like has always been in you.

Melancon: You know, when I talk about passion for the profession, I think it’s largely twofold. One, the importance to society of what we do. People might prefer to use the public interest terminology, but I think it’s actually broader than just what people traditionally merge or define as public interest. It’s the impact in entrepreneurial businesses and the impact in charitable organizations and the impact in, obviously, capital markets as well. That is a really important thing to society. We use the tagline, “We empower trust, opportunity, and prosperity.”

Well, that’s about elevating things and making the world better and making economies better, the economic part of the world. And also the trust part of the world, and that’s the second thing — that we live in a world today that it’s difficult to find things to trust in. We have polarized elections, not just in the U.S. By the way, if you look at sort of the Western world today, there are significant issues.

We’re going to see an election in Canada; they’ve already had some no-confidence sort of discussions. Australia has had a major shift. That’s a Western economy. We just had a major shift in the UK. Germany has just had a failed government. France has just had a failed government. Those are just off the top of my head.

There’s this notion of unsettledness in the world. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, you can’t deny that. I like to put it in the context of what do we trust in? As a people of the world, we live in a time in which for a lot of reasons, and people have different theories on the reasons. I would say social media is one of the elements that goes to that. I think it’s a period of significant change. Technology, AI — that brings a lot of distrust where people worry about the implications of those types of things.

We certainly have conflict today; that brings more distrust. But we don’t really trust a whole lot as a people. We don’t trust the media. We don’t trust government, we don’t trust big business. To a large degree, we don’t trust religions or religious leaders today. Yet through all of that, as it relates to the relationship that CPAs have with entrepreneurs or business leaders, and CEOs, etc., it’s actually incredibly strong. There’s incredible trust, and when CPAs are involved, that trust notion expands broader to even people not directly related to that relationship. I think that that’s an incredibly important thing that we do, and that’s a passion point, but it really comes from the men and women in our profession.

They’re the ones, the collective they, all of us, who create that by how and what we do and how we approach things and our intellect and our competencies, etc. That’s very powerful and it’s very important, and it’s something that I hope that CPAs take pride in. And whatever the name of the credential is somewhere else in the world, I hope they take pride in that. And then I hope they take some degree of obligation in that because it’s important to the world. I just think we live in a time and maybe we will always live in times like this going forward, that finding elements of trust is really critical. And we own that to a large degree. We own that more than probably anybody else.

I’ll remind people during one of our most difficult times, Enron and WorldCom, the data we had showed that a Main Street person had incredible trust in the CPA they knew during that entire time. They may have had questions about the capital market system because you had a company like Enron which had fraud and failed, and you had a company like WorldCom that failed in a very compressed time. But what it showed is that people who were engaged in society and business, etc., they knew CPAs, and they had incredible trust for the people they knew, that CPA.

That hasn’t changed. That was a 1999, 2000, 2001 issue, and it really was important to how we solve those issues and how the profession came out of that process. That’s a heck of a statement that I just said about how people feel about the people who are in this profession. It’s important for people entering the profession to understand that and to be committed to that. It’s important for people who have been in the profession or maybe even ready to exit the profession to hand that off and really think about what that means and how you have to really preserve that going forward.

Amato: For your time over the years, several times on the Journal of Accountancy podcast, speaking to our listeners, I just want to say thanks.

Melancon: Well, you’re quite welcome, Neil. It’s been great to be with you, but it’s equally as great to be maybe distant in some ways, all the listeners and the members and the readers. The outpouring that I’ve received from people during these months has just been incredible and how much people appreciate what we’ve done. We haven’t pleased everybody 100% of the time. But again, the quality of the men and women in our profession and their ability to communicate that during this time, for me, as I’m transitioning to something else, is really just humbling. And it’s been a great honor to work for the people who make up this profession is what it amounts to for me.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript: