Fraud, football, and a viral video: A midsummer compilation

This episode is a midsummer look back at insights from selected 2023 podcast guests, from a Super Bowl CFO to the AICPA vice chair. Links to the full episodes mentioned are below:

• Super Bowl CFO: How finance supports the Chiefs’ on-field success
• Won’t get fooled again: The who, what, and why of fraud
• Managing vs. leading: Why that distinction matters in the modern workplace
• The power skills needed to lead effectively – from the AICPA’s vice chair

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Dan Crumb’s recall of how operations such as mobile ordering of food and drink improved at the Kansas City Chiefs’ stadium after the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Kelly Richmond Pope’s view of how the “red flags” of fraud are sometimes missed.
• Hamza Khan’s explanation of why some of the initial comments about his 2016 TEDx talk were “demoralizing” to him.
• How an early obstacle helped to form AICPA Vice Chair Carla McCall’s approach to mentorship.

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 to this midsummer edition of the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I want to take a moment to say thank you to all of you out there who have made the JofA podcast part of their routine. We have a thriving show, and that’s because we have listeners who keep coming back. So thank you. Especially for those regular repeat listeners, this episode will have some voices you’re familiar with. It’s a best-of-2023-so-far compilation of a few sound clips that either we’ve gotten good feedback about or have simply stood out to me as memorable. You’ll hear those highlights right after this word from our sponsor.

Amato: First up is CPA Dan Crumb, the CFO of the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. I talked to Dan before the Chiefs won the franchise’s second Lombardi Trophy in four seasons about how finance has played a role in enhancing the gameday experience using data.

With all these interviews, we will post links to the full episodes in the show notes, so if you missed them, you can go back and listen. Hope you’ll enjoy this segment with Dan Crumb of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Amato: One thing that I think is really important to you and really important to the franchise is the atmosphere at Arrowhead Stadium and the customer experience. You talked some about that before, and I was hoping you could talk about some of the ways that finance and some of those data-driven initiatives have helped improve that customer experience over the years.

Dan Crumb: Sure. As a matter of fact, when we were going through COVID and the world was at a state of change and more open to change, we took that time to look at how we do things in the building and where are there are areas for improvement. One of the things we looked at, and it was driven by the way the world was at that time, was we went completely cashless. We don’t take cash at all in the building.

As a matter of looking at how we distribute our items, so thinking concessions. At that time, there weren’t as many people in the building, so the lines were shorter, and the customer experience was better. It was quicker, but we had only partial buildings. We took that same concept and asked the question, “What if we went to mobile ordering so that now our customers can get on their mobile device, go through their Chiefs app and order, and then just go pick it up at a concession stand when it’s ready so they don’t have to wait?” They can just preorder, go to the nearest concession stand and pick it up. That was a successful trial, and we’ve actually done it now to where we have at every game day, every event day. We have the ability to do that.

We’ve also invested more in our loyalty club — our Chiefs Kingdom Rewards Club is what we call it. We look at that to get a couple of things. One thing is customer buying habits. What are they purchasing? Just what customers are in the building? Where are they in their journey in the building? It helps to give us a real good feel for what they’re doing when they’re here, so that we can tailor the experience.

Another way we’re using data to improve is we look at individuals [as they] are driving into the complex, how they’re getting parked. We look at how they get into the gates as far as once they park and then they walk in. We’ve got a control room where we have large monitors with all of these graphs that show scan counts live. As individuals are coming in the building, individuals are coming in the parking lot. We can match that up against previous events and see, “Are we trending the right way?”

That tells us we’re in good shape, we’re going to get everybody in at our targets. Our target is always have every vehicle parked before kickoff and have every fan in the stadium before kickoff. We met that every game this season and we continue to. Those scans, that being able to see that data live tells us if we have to adjust something. If we see one gate is parking, tollgate is getting backed up, we can reroute traffic. If we see an entry gate is getting backed up, we can reroute those people, but it just enables us to really help and make sure that everybody is coming in on time and they can enjoy the full experience of our stadium.

Amato: Next up is a conversation I had early this year with multitalented CPA Kelly Richmond Pope. Her focus is fraud, a topic that she has addressed in a documentary film, in a book, and in the classroom. That’s in her role as an accounting professor at DePaul University. In this clip, she is answering a question about her recent book and some of its focus on lack of internal controls and how sometimes in organizations, people overlook the obvious and how not everyone is empowered to speak up about fraud.

Kelly Richmond Pope: By focusing on characters and story, I wanted people to read it and see themselves or see their businesses in the stories that are depicted in the book. So, sometimes, we overlook the obvious. A lot of times we ignore the red flags for a lot of psychological reasons. It may be a friend of ours. We may be over-trusting, so I think that through the stories, I hope people can understand their own missteps and their own ways that they can overlook the obvious. That was the first thing.

The second thing that I hope that readers would understand through the stories and through the cases was the issue of not putting in the proper internal controls, and I think that where there’s fraud, there’s always a lack of internal controls, and it’s really simple. I think we see that so often because we overtrust, and we have to stop doing that.

I wanted to make sure that readers would see these cases and one, understand how the red flags are missed, but two, understand how just introducing internal controls correctly could have prevented the fraud. Now, the last piece of not empowering the right people is really going back to the importance of effective compliance and ethics training, and I believe that it’s every employee’s role to mitigate fraud.

If you have effective training, if everyone knows that it is their job to police it, then everyone is empowered. So I think sometimes the problem is you just put it into one department, and that’s never going to be a great fraud police person. You want to make sure everyone’s empowered. So what you’ll notice through the stories is that a lot of fraud happens in front of everybody’s eyes. If everyone is empowered, and they know the red flags, and you have the internal controls there in place, most of these cases never would have happened. So through storytelling, through humor, through engagement, I hope that readers understand and find value in the book.

Amato: The next clip came from a conversation I had with keynote speaker Hamza Khan. He and I are discussing his revolutionary talk about remote work, many years before remote work became so entrenched.

Amato: Now you have a TEDx talk from 2016. I think it’s been viewed millions of times. What I’d like for you to reflect on is, do you ever look back on that and marvel about how it was ahead of its time, as it was strongly advocating in 2016 for remote work?

Khan: Neil, this is so interesting you say that. It was somehow so ahead of its time back then as it is even now. When I delivered it, it was received very well by my peers, by fellow Millennials, by younger generations, by even leaders in other generations — Boomers, Gen X — who were open to these ideas about hybrid work, flexible work, laissez-faire attitudes to leadership, transformational leadership, so on and so forth.

But it was swiftly struck down by my more traditional peers. In fact, my boss at the time actually summoned me to his office that night, and he said, “Tomorrow morning, I need you in the office first thing in the morning.” He dressed me down that next morning for delivering this TedTalk, which he described as being seditious to the existing order within the institution I was working at.

That was very demoralizing for me on the one hand to receive all of this validation from my peers, but to also be struck down by the gatekeepers, if you will. I actually lost confidence in the message for a number of years, Neil.

Then just at the beginning of the pandemic, I received invitations from different organizations around the world and one in particular, James Hunt out of the University of New Castle in Australia of all places, said, “This TedTalk that you’ve delivered is very prescient and it’s one of the best messages about leadership that I’ve heard in the last 20 years.” I thought, “Wow, I mean, this is remarkable that you are resonating with this idea on the other side of the world.” So we set up an event. I went, I spoke over there and to see the reception to this message several years later was extremely validating for me. It made me think that there is something in this talk that is clearly striking a chord with people.

Then, Neil, as we know, the pandemic happened. This talk had already done well in terms of views and engagement online. But during the pandemic, it was like a light switch was hit, and this talk took on a life of its own, man. I think now it’s nearly three million views on YouTube. Last time I checked, it’s approaching that, which is surreal to me because it was such a personal talk for me at the time. Again, recounting that I lost confidence and faith in my own message, rediscovered it at the beginning of the pandemic, and now it is out there, it’s in the zeitgeist. People have taken that message, they’ve repurposed it. And somehow this message is still relevant, given that many leaders and organizations in the world right now are struggling with the fundamental message at the heart of this talk, which is put people first.

Amato: Khan was the keynote speaker at the AICPA & CIMA CFO Conference, an annual spring event. Next up is AICPA vice chair Carla McCall, who I got to meet — well, the virtual version of “meet” — when she was attending AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE in early June in Las Vegas.

Again, the full conversation will be linked in the show notes. In this clip, I’m asking McCall about the importance of mentorship and what she’s gotten from those experiences. The start of her answer quite honestly was surprising but also refreshing to me.

Tell me this: Every leader I think has mentors, but how have you been led in the past and maybe the good and the bad, and what have you taken from those experiences?

McCall: Yeah. That’s a little bit of a loaded question because coming up, there wasn’t a lot of mentorship when I was growing up in the profession, and so a lot of what has evolved in our firm I had to create. There wasn’t really strong HR, there were no mentor programs and things like that, so I had to build, and that’s part of my leadership journey coming up.

As a partner, I was able to create a lot, and I’m grateful that the partners at the time gave me the leeway to build programs like our first mentorship program, our first coaching program that evolved to our Professional Accountant Development Program, which is a group coaching model, that then evolved into the Women’s Opportunity Network, our Innovation Lab, our Changemaker Challenge, our diversity, equity, inclusion, and on and on and on.

Part of my leadership journey has been a deep desire to improve the environment around me. That’s what led me to create programs that I felt were important but I didn’t see in place. All of that being said, and I do try to mentor others to give back and encourage other people to ask for what they deserve, to voice opinions, to give ideas, and don’t be shy about it. That really will show people in leadership that you have something to bring to the table. You have great ideas, you’re not afraid to voice them, and that all builds on leadership.

That being said, I did have some mentors along the way. One of the founders of our firm was a great mentor because he wasn’t afraid to give me candid feedback. I think every person in any leadership journey needs to have self-awareness, needs to be able to accept feedback, needs to make themselves a little bit vulnerable, and you need to be keenly aware of your blind spots.

Amato: Do you think that accepting feedback is a skill you have to learn over the years?

McCall: Yes. We have two executive coaches that sit in our firm, and their sole job is literally coaching our team members. But it’s anybody in the firm. They are doing full potential coaching with a lot of partners in the firm because we need strong leaders.

Listen, getting feedback doesn’t always feel good, so we need to acknowledge our feelings about it. Do I want to be told that I made somebody feel bad in a meeting? No. Do I have a pit in my stomach when someone’s giving [feedback]? Yes, but you need to really embrace it and get through the feeling and then feel bad for a little bit. Then say, “What am I going to do to fix it so that doesn’t happen again?” If you have the resources to help you, I don’t think we can always adjust it on our own. That’s where talent advisers or executive coaches have that ability to work with you to understand why you may have done what you did, or talk about the differences that people have.

A lot of negative feedback or, I’ll say, constructive feedback comes from just people being different and having different natural preferences, and we need to interact with different people differently. Once you understand that, there’s a lot of power in how you can develop better relationships.

Amato: Again, that was AICPA vice chair Carla McCall. Thanks again for listening to the show. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to follow the JofA podcast wherever you listen. Please give us a rating and a review. Talk to you again next week.