Goal Setting for the New Year: Get Innovative

Are you still on track with your new year’s resolutions, or have you written them down yet? We typically contemplate resolutions for our personal lives, and in our business lives we think of them as the new year’s goals. Whichever way you classify them, the fresh start to the year is a great time to think about what you would like to change personally and professionally, and this year I challenge you to infuse a little INNOVATION into your plans.

It is hard enough sometimes just to write out your goals, and now I am suggesting to get innovative with them! Isn’t that much more time consuming? At CPA.com’s recent Digital CPA Conference, innovation executive Amy Radin pointed out that innovation is really just business problem solving. She, and others, pointed out the importance of taking an outside view of your business, to really gain the perspectives that will help you build and grow for future success. Even if you weren’t at the conference, the Twitter feed from #DCPA15 has many gems of wisdom to help invigorate your innovation culture and effective goal setting.

Here is an aggregation of some tweets to get you started:

  • “How do you build an innovation culture? @TomHood says to start with a shared belief.”
  • “Sometimes to stay who you are, you have to change what you do,” Jim Collins and shared by Tom Hood
  • “Conflict is not a bad thing; leads to innovation,” Tim Shortsleeve
  • “Consider mentoring an entrepreneur to help them and you with innovation ideas.”
  • “Don’t get overwhelmed – prioritize top 5 things, or if you are just starting top 3.”

Sound advice from a few Tweets! Make sure you take time to plan for 2016 and work on your innovation culture! CPA.com did a survey late in 2015 of CPA’s and most identified the need to be innovative, but time and resources kept them from following through. Jim Collins would say, “Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.” Make sure your plan includes:

  1. Focusing around your “Why” (Simon Sinek, “Start with Why”)
  2. Input from various sources
  3. Prioritization of a small list; don’t try to boil the ocean

Dan Hood, editor-in-chief of Accounting Today, wrote an article of 2016 to do’s calendarized by month. This might be a good place to start in place of staring at a blank page; then customize for yourself. Make sure you are looking for unique solutions, not SALY.

Happy New Year!

A Closer Look at Our Startup Accelerator Companies

The CPA.com/Association of International Certified Professional Accountants Startup Accelerator is an annual program that finds, invests in, and guides early-stage tech companies with solutions that support accounting and finance professionals. This blog series provides a deeper look at the five companies in the 2021 cohort.