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Jeremy Hyman is the Founder and Principal of Jeremy Hyman Associates, an IT services and consulting company that helps firms make sound IT decisions. With over 25 years of experience in the professional services sector and a degree in law, Jeremy is an IT manager, partner, software developer, and management consultant. In this episode, Jeremy and Stuart discuss multiple technological breakthroughs over the last two years, as well as some things to keep an eye out in the future. They also chat about remote work, the new reality of virtual meetings, and how technology distracts us on a day-to-day basis.
Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:06.416 Hi, I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and co-founder of Karbon. Welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, the show where I go behind the scenes with the world's top accounting leaders. Today I'm joined by Jeremy Hyman, the founder and principal of Jeremy Hyman Associates, IT services and consulting company that helps firms make good IT decisions. With over 25 years of experience in the professional services sector and a degree in law, Jeremy is IT manager, partner, software developer, and management consultant. He combines a thorough understanding of professional firms, technical disciplines, and effective approach to provide IT leadership and guidance. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast; Jeremy Hyman.
Jeremy Hyman 00:00:50.571 Hi there, Stuart. How are you doing?
Stuart McLeod 00:00:51.930 I'm very well, Jeremy. Wonderful to see you today.
Jeremy Hyman 00:00:55.181 It's lovely to see you as well. The magic of technology is actually working.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:58.810 The guys wanted to use the whole video. I said A, I don't want to have to fucking worry about the whole video because then I have to do my hair and have to get dressed and put pants on.
Jeremy Hyman 00:01:10.324 Yeah, I don't want to know what you're not wearing. That's true. For what it's worth. But yeah, just for clarity.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:16.135 The whole point of a podcast is turn up 10 minutes late.
Jeremy Hyman 00:01:19.907 Should be informal.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:21.017 I haven't done any research.
Jeremy Hyman 00:01:24.217 Neither have I. But you know what? I thought, actually, you and I, we've known each other a while, and we're in the same kind of orbit. I think if we can't chat for a bit and get some useful content out of it, then we should both retire.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:37.937 I've been very much looking forward to seeing you. And to be honest, the podcast is just a very fragile excuse to catch up with such esteemed industry veterans such as yourself.
Jeremy Hyman 00:01:53.507 Oh, God, veterans. Sounds bad. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:56.078 Am I making you sound old?
Jeremy Hyman 00:01:58.428 Yeah, I don't want to hear that. I didn't want to hear that. Whereabouts are you? Are you in the US?
Stuart McLeod 00:02:02.626 Yes, I'm in Reno, Nevada, right now.
Jeremy Hyman 00:02:05.626 Oh, yeah, I know Reno. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:08.154 And I came down the hill from Incline this morning, and it's a beautiful blue sky day here.
Jeremy Hyman 00:02:17.873 Oh, yeah, very nice. Very nice.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:20.021 And just about to see the snow on the hills in the distance. Yeah. And it's actually going to snow some more this week, which is ridiculous because all the mountains are shut, so we're going to go for a walk on the weekend up the hill and put some planks on and see what we can find, ski down. Lovely.
Jeremy Hyman 00:02:42.328 Very nice. Very nice. I'm in Northern Israel at the moment, so I'm about half an hour north of Tel Aviv, and it's been another glorious day here as well. Fantastic. Just enjoying that.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:53.451 And you spend sort of half your time in Israel, half your time in the UK. Is that still the arrangement at the moment?
Jeremy Hyman 00:03:00.739 Yeah, it's something like that. So I'm probably spending two weeks, a month in Israel, a week in the UK, and a week wherever else I'm working. So a bit of time in the US, a bit of time in Europe, and it's good, actually. I quite like the-- as COVID is-- I don't think it's gone, but it's subsided. It's a bit easier to travel. It's a bit easier to get out and about. And I enjoy it, really. I enjoy that aspect of it.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:23.309 Yeah. It's got to the point now where it's relatively straightforward to travel by yourself. Trust me, traveling with a three-year-old is still a fucking pain in the ass.
Jeremy Hyman 00:03:33.919 Yeah. But it always was.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:35.000 COVID or no COVID.
Jeremy Hyman 00:03:36.865 It's only the reasons that change from time to time, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:03:39.145 Yes, exactly.
Jeremy Hyman 00:03:42.194 No one ever thought, oh, I know what I'll do today. I'll go for a long trip on a plane with a very young child.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:48.231 I'll get on a 17-hour flight at 10:30 AM and travel through two days and three time zones. That sounds a good idea, doesn't it?
Jeremy Hyman 00:03:56.958 Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:57.836 And try and make him wear a mask [crosstalk].
Jeremy Hyman 00:03:58.984 [crosstalk] is everyone else on the plane. Just to say, yeah, yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:03.579 It's still a bust with wings. That's all it is.
Jeremy Hyman 00:04:06.178 Where you spending your time then? So are you still very US-focused? Are you really all over the place? How's things looking for you?
Stuart McLeod 00:04:12.705 Well, after two or three years with limited travel in a small touristy mountainside town, we're looking forward to doing some travel this year. And we just got back from Australia. So we did two weeks back seeing family and working in Sydney. And that was just amazing. Right. The last time I was out there, we had sort of, what? Half a dozen people or something? Now we got 55 and adding 3 or 4 a week.
Jeremy Hyman 00:04:38.766 Goodness me. And that's been an enforced break. You just haven't been able to go to Oz, and that's been that.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:43.201 That's right.
Jeremy Hyman 00:04:43.676 And they've not been able to come out. So this has been a big release to be able to visit with them.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:47.698 Yeah. No, it was great. It was really great. I mean, obviously, the grandparents have had very limited contact with the kids and especially the three-year-old. I mean, the last time they saw him was a couple of months old.
Jeremy Hyman 00:04:59.670 Yeah. They've had no meaningful contact.
Stuart McLeod 00:05:01.717 No. Now he's just a three-year-old, lovely little boy who can be a little prick sometimes. Takes after his father, his mum says.
Jeremy Hyman 00:05:12.333 Reassuring that we know who the father is. That's all that should be. No, no, no. Reassured, yeah. Yeah. [laughter]
Stuart McLeod 00:05:20.406 He's got all the same spectrum tendencies.
Jeremy Hyman 00:05:25.975 Excellent. And what's driven that growth in the Australian team? Is it more clients? Is it more functionality? What's the story behind that?
Stuart McLeod 00:05:34.855 Yeah. So John Freeman, my co-founder, I guess we're in our third company now is CTO, and he was in the Bay Area with me when we first founded the company, but he moved back to Sydney. Back to Australia to Sydney, what? Two or three years ago now? Maybe. And so, we're building the product and development teams primarily around him and his senior staff in Sydney and Canberra. And the reason we argued about this for quite some period of time in terms of it's very hard to find talent everywhere in the world, but particularly if you just sort of focus on one geography. But he was adamant and correct. John, you were right.
Jeremy Hyman 00:06:20.900 For the record. For the record.
Stuart McLeod 00:06:22.059 For the record, yes. You can transcribe that, lucky. And team, just with the volume of software that we need to build this year or that we want to build. [Not that?] we don't need to. We don't need to do anything. We want to build the onramp for new engineering at that pace. It makes sense to do it in the same physical, at least geographically similar locations. So we've got about 50 desks and about 60 staff in Sydney, and so we're doing more or less somewhere between two and five days a week for the staff. But our hybrid work philosophy hasn't really changed that much throughout COVID. I've always been of the mindset work is a great place to-- the magic happens when people get together. It's very hard to do in 2D, and we're sort of getting back to that. What do you feel about that?
Jeremy Hyman 00:07:17.074 I think the tech firms have been the least affected by the COVID lockdowns and by the separation. And although you're right, people, they kind of are a breeding ground for ideas when they're in close proximity to each other. It's the nature of the people who work in tech firms that they're not the most sociable. And sometimes they really are quite happy sitting in a sort of proverbial bedroom cutting code. I think the danger with that, though, and you've got to kind of correct it, is that if you want to write software for professionals, you've got to understand how professionals think. And professionals very much do work together. And there is a lot of driving one another through being in the same office and good software professionals, they get in the head of their customer. They don't just write clever code. There'll be 10% if you just want to write code.
Stuart McLeod 00:08:00.838 Yeah. That's right.
Jeremy Hyman 00:08:00.898 But most people, if you're in UI, if in UX, if you're in functionality, the more you understand what your client's trying to achieve, the better the code will be. So you've got to get yourself into a headspace that reflects that. I think that's where that goes. But yeah, I mean, like you, this COVID didn't come as a surprise for hybrid working. I've worked at home for I don't know how long. Offices, to me, just mean paying rates and rent for someone that doesn't deserve it most of the time. So quite happy to stop doing that, really. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:08:26.162 Yeah. No, we can agree. I mean, I find the debate around Goldman Sachs and other places that are sort of insisting on a five-day return to the office. I find that quite interesting. It's sort of like I find that stance admirable. It's not for us, but they're much better off coming out and saying, look, we are five days. If you don't want to work in an office five days a week, fuck off. Go somewhere else.
Jeremy Hyman 00:08:51.597 Yeah, I hear that. But you know what? All these things, there are reflections of a corporate culture that's wiser than just this. So Goldman Sachs approached all of the staff all the time. And if you don't want to do what we want to do, go and work somewhere else, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:09:02.258 That's right. At least it's transparent.
Jeremy Hyman 00:09:04.046 But then other firms which have been-- yeah, you know where you stand or where you stood.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:09.614 That's right. Until you walk down the street. Yeah.
Jeremy Hyman 00:09:13.232 But then the more collegiate firms or the more relaxed ones are the ones that are saying, yeah, hybrid, whatever, because we believe in you, go work wherever you do. Just make sure the output is fair. So I think that this is just another manifestation of the corporate culture of that particular business, really.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:28.318 Correct.
Jeremy Hyman 00:09:29.237 There's no newness there.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:30.244 Correct. But I think the transparency is what is most important. Right. There's no point in saying, oh, we're all hybrid, and you can do one day a week, and then the ones are getting the promotions and the Ford, the opportunities; the ones that are in the office more. Right. That's where I think the transparency breaks down. It's not fair on the employee base.
Jeremy Hyman 00:09:52.438 Correct. To counter your Goldman Sachs one, Deloitte have just not renewed a tremendous amount of office space in London. Yeah. And I think it's abandoned 250,000 square foot of office space, which is a huge amount. And part of that, I guess, is that the office space-- I don't know. The firm was maybe being used for back-office functions that didn't need prime rental properties in London. And I'm quite sure a lot of the tidying up that is subscribed to COVID has been on someone's action list for a very long time. But clearly, also they are adopting a more accommodating approach. Let's call it that. Same, work where you want, and it's output-based, doesn't it? It's like if you do the job that you need to do, I don't mind when or how you do it.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:32.921 No, exactly. And I'm just doing some half-ass [intermediate?] research here, and they're saying exactly that. Look, we don't really care where you work. The new world is the new world. We've adapted after COVID. Great. No problems. You do you. Just be honest and transparent about it.
Jeremy Hyman 00:10:51.585 The only thing they haven't quite said is we wanted to do this for years, and COVID gave us the excuse we needed to do it. Or any slight nuance to it.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:58.769 You're saying Deloitte made the virus in the lab in Wuhan? That's what you're saying. That's what I heard Jeremy Hyman say.
Jeremy Hyman 00:11:04.881 But I'm absolutely not saying that. Yeah. That'll be a good edit. Where are you? I'm fascinated to know your view because you work closely with more US firms than I do. But I saw that at least one and maybe a couple of firms have opened up virtual offices in the Metaverse. Right. And they said, yeah, come and visit our virtual office or whatever. Are they just worried that someone else is going to get their domain name and use it? Do you think they're on the right track and that we all want a virtual office? Is it a bit of FOMO? I can't work it out myself. I'm not sure. I think it's all a bit early, but that might just be being a bit grumpy.
Stuart McLeod 00:11:42.850 Well, we had some other firm, and it was a UK firm, actually, that we promised to do a podcast in the Metaverse. I haven't got around to it yet. We've got to do that. Okay, so my personal and biased opinion is I would be much more interested in the Metaverse if it wasn't being primarily driven by a socially and morally bankrupt company.
Jeremy Hyman 00:12:08.740 Okay, let's dive straight into the deep end and fine. Okay. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:12:12.518 And one that you know, that you visit to that office is not going to be recorded and used for machine learning purposes and algorithmic aspects. And then, I turn on my phone, and I've got ads that I--
Jeremy Hyman 00:12:27.572 Seriously, seriously. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:12:29.549 If I can get past those biases, I kind of love the idea. I hate the avatar aspect. I think that's a bit-- maybe that's just an entree into sort of what's going to be next. Maybe. Yes.
Jeremy Hyman 00:12:46.501 But it's hard to call it, isn't it? It's hard to call it. It's not a clear-cut-- I think the first one to do was Prager Metis. Not an insubstantial firm.
Stuart McLeod 00:12:54.954 I better get them on the podcast. Thank you for the tip. Prager Metis. Yeah.
Jeremy Hyman 00:12:58.480 Yeah. And I don't [inaudible] if you get them get out on the podcast as well because we would like to. But they built out an office, and they've got office space and a meeting space. So I think it's somewhere between being early and brave and a bit gimmicky. But then there's a couple of threeletter.coms I wish I had registered and never did. So maybe they're just right where they should be in the adoption curve.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:23.100 Head of the curve. Look, being too early can be wrong. Or being too early is often wrong. I don't know. There's something about Leia in Star Wars, right, appearing as a hologram and having the meeting.
Jeremy Hyman 00:13:38.651 Yeah, I liked it. I liked it. It didn't feel too early to me. It's fine.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:43.227 I've had a couple of half-ass goes in the company to get the Oculus.
Jeremy Hyman 00:13:48.821 Yeah. Headsets.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:49.718 Headsets around some offices or around some people and try it. And they all said, get fucked, Stuart. You're an idiot.
Jeremy Hyman 00:13:58.534 It's nice that you come on that level of respect [in the picture?].
Stuart McLeod 00:14:00.498 The respect and the admiration in the company it just never wanes. I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist, Jeremy. I'd love to see 3D meetings and give it a go.
Jeremy Hyman 00:14:16.063 Yeah, I think it will come. I don't know that technology is sufficiently mature yet, but I think we have now-- if we went back two, three, four years ago, if I would have said to my clients, let's meet virtually, they wouldn't have understood the question. It's not even they would have said no. They wouldn't have understood the question. Their mid-market CPAs, accountants, whatever wasn't in their radar. If you wanted to have a video meeting, you had to be a big blue-chip with a video conferencing suite and all of the things.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:44.040 The $35,000 Polycom kit.
Jeremy Hyman 00:14:47.931 Can you imagine? Yeah. And oddly, the laptops were shipping with webcams, but no one was using them. Right. And then, now it's the exception, not the rule, to meet in person. That's with COVID in [abeyance?] and whatever. People I find like a conference. They like to be able to meet 100 people at once and network and chat or, like you said, sort of a state visit to the development floor in Sydney, whatever. But the one to ones, the one to twos, the one to threes, [not?] people very relaxed being remote. As that matures, so if we see avatars coming in there, if we see proper VR headsets that are cheap and comfortable and don't heat your brain up while you're trying to use them, I think people like it because--
Stuart McLeod 00:15:29.911 Heats your brain up.
Jeremy Hyman 00:15:31.126 But what you get back in return is the most valuable commodity for any professional, which is time. Time you didn't have to spend commuting, time you didn't have to spend parking, time you didn't have to spend waiting for a train or a plane or whatever. And if I can give that back to somebody, they will take that because they can use that time for them. Whatever is more valuable.
Stuart McLeod 00:15:49.151 Yeah. I think there's something else. We're talking today from Israel to Reno in 2D, and I love catching up like this. But there's something else to the 3D aspect, isn't it? The closer that you can get to that personal contact, and I know we've got an hour scheduled, and we miss out on the small talk a bit that you get from being in the office. I get that. I think the closer you can get to a real in-person experience, the better off the world is. Right. I don't know. Am I being too optimistic that you form better relationships when the interaction is more real? I think hiding behind Zoom is a thing.
Jeremy Hyman 00:16:36.224 I think you have more bandwidth and latitude if you meet in person. Right. So where everything is going swimmingly well, then teams or Zoom works fine because it's a functional transactional experience.
Stuart McLeod 00:16:50.031 That's a great point.
Jeremy Hyman 00:16:50.441 Right. Where you need what you and I would have called the personal touch. Right. And a little bit more nuanced conversation then that is much harder to do digitally. And it's impossible, I would argue, to do where you are the only digital party. That's where it really falls apart. So where you've got three or four people physically meeting, and you're looking down from 100-inch screen, everyone's looking up your nose. That is pretty hard to have a nuanced conversation from that position. So I guess it's horses for courses. If I'm in my sports car mode, then it's not very useful if I go and buy a bed in IKEA and try and pick it up. There's a particular way of doing it that it's going to work. Right. So I think it's not a one size fits all. And therefore, if you can use your digital interaction for the mundane and not waste time on that and therefore reserve time for the physical meets that make a real difference, then to me, that's a pretty good way of working. We had plenty of meetings, didn't we, that we really didn't need to have. Physical meetings where two hours later, that's two hours of my life I'm never getting back.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:49.224 I love the meetings about the meetings. They're the best.
Jeremy Hyman 00:17:53.858 I once went to a meeting. I shouldn't. I probably shouldn't put this on a thing, but there must have been 17 people in this meeting. It was the first time I ever met with this client.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:01.469 Wow. It's a $300,000 meeting. Yeah.
Jeremy Hyman 00:18:04.428 Right. And some people came in with food. I thought that's a bit odd. And they were like, they've been to these meetings before, and they'd come prepped. It was like going camping, sat out there, their food in front of them. And I was like, okay.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:16.374 Yeah. Wow. When I bring my sandwich to a meeting, Jeremy, it's fucking all over.
Jeremy Hyman 00:18:21.263 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's a warning sign. Absolutely. But you know what? I'll tell you another subtlety that I've observed in physical meetings versus virtual meetings. Professionals always quite liked physical meetings in their offices because I think that that gave an air of explaining who's in charge. You come to my territory.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:41.296 You come to my territory. And I'll fucking tell you what's what. Yeah.
Jeremy Hyman 00:18:44.594 Exactly. I will give you advice on X, Y, Z, but it's come to my office, and I'm going to advise you. Right. And by the way, you're not going to be on your laptop checking it on Google. And it's like going to the doctor. You go to their territory or whatever. And I think that quite a few professionals have had to up their game when that protective structure has been taken away from them, and suddenly they've actually put on a spot--
Stuart McLeod 00:19:06.848 --where the power balance is not being initiated. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy Hyman 00:19:10.509 Because it's true, isn't it? You go into their territory, and you are immediately diminished or on your back foot because of that.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:18.777 It's 49/51 at best, right. It's not 50/50.
Jeremy Hyman 00:19:22.359 Correct. And I think that's also had an impact on relationships, and it's made professionals have to up their game in their kind of relationship management a little bit.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:32.007 Yeah, no, I agree. And we could get on to the great resignation and all of that stuff. But I think as a travel aficionado, I'm more interested in sort of perhaps expanding on how relationships are going to work in the new hybrid world and how travel works because I think there's some fascinating airline companies and travel companies sort of working on all kinds of different modes of transport that sort of goes to your point. Right. You can do meaningful travel and get rid of the meaningless meetings and do them-- well, hopefully, you don't do them, but when you have to do them, you do them like this. And things like Boom and these different transport companies are making hemispheric travel much easier. And so, that time that you were talking about before, hopefully, those global relationships start to reform, and it becomes more carbon-efficient too. Or carbon-effective, at least.
Jeremy Hyman 00:20:38.224 I was reading in the Times the other day about electric planes, which I was gloriously ignorant about. It's one of those things that you read, and you realize that you've missed an awful lot that's been going on. And this is an aircraft, I think, built in the UK, I'm going say. Can seat six people. Right. It's got a 250-mile range and runs off a battery. I think I would like one of those, please, quite soon. And I think the idea of personalized--
Stuart McLeod 00:21:06.202 Just don't get to 251 miles, Jeremy.
Jeremy Hyman 00:21:09.816 Yeah, correct. Right. There are some issues. Yeah. It's a new phrase, a new concept of range anxiety. You're not just going to grind--
Stuart McLeod 00:21:17.622 Range anxiety. Yes. It has a new meaning when you're at 20,000 feet, doesn't it?
Jeremy Hyman 00:21:22.946 It really does. Yeah. But you know, and I know that these are all early adopters and whatever, but we all laughed at Tesla, right. And it's the most valuable car.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:32.848 I don't know if I laughed. Yeah. But I was intrigued.
Jeremy Hyman 00:21:35.557 In his early days, he was disregarded as a flash in the pan.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:40.867 He's come full circle. What the fuck is he worrying about Tesla? [I meant?] Tesla, about Twitter, for Christ.
Jeremy Hyman 00:21:46.928 Twitter. I don't know. I'm going to wait till I read it on Twitter because that'll be definitive.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:51.610 You'll be doing something else while you're doing it.
Jeremy Hyman 00:21:53.819 But before you go on a rant about him, my point was that even if these things are early stage and not really working, that means we're 10 years out or 15 years out or 20 years out. The point where instead of having a car, I've got some kind of something I can get in and go 200 miles away without burning any fuel.
Stuart McLeod 00:22:12.261 No, it's amazing.
Jeremy Hyman 00:22:13.261 That will be incredible. And that will happen.
Stuart McLeod 00:22:15.260 There's some really interesting ones. One is called LIFT.
Jeremy Hyman 00:22:20.190 LIFT is the Uber [mob?].
Stuart McLeod 00:22:22.112 It's more like a drone. It almost looks like a big, big drone that carries two or three people. That's a really interesting one. I think the Boom supersonic one. So eVTOL is the one that I was thinking of. eVTOL. Anderson Cooper just did a 60 Minutes thing. That's sort of like a personal transport sort of solution. The one that I was referring to before is Boom supersonic. So they're not electric. You can't go that fast with an electric plane. But am I showing your age? Did you ever fly on the Concord?
Jeremy Hyman 00:22:59.817 No. My dad had a Concord flight not that long ago, and it was still something exotic, but I feel we've traveled backwards on that.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:09.018 Yeah, we have.
Jeremy Hyman 00:23:09.919 Concord is 1960s technology. And we can't do it anymore. We've de-evolved. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:18.299 Hang on, we can put this in the podcast notes, can't we? Check out Boom Supersonic. They're out of Denver, I want to say. Hang on. North Carolina. And they're mostly out of Colorado. They're working on the next generation of Concord, and I reckon it's fascinating. It's sort of like they've got Paris to Montreal, 3 hours and 45. Los Angeles to Sydney-- there we go. There's more interesting. 8 hours 30. That'd be nice.
Jeremy Hyman 00:23:49.383 Yeah. Which means anywhere will be 8 hours 30. Right. That will be the-- I guess where this leads us to, your question was, what's going to change is that we'll have more tools at our disposal. So if you wind back to the industrial revolution, man was limited in his world, or woman was limited in her world by the radius of travel: how far you could walk, how far you could go on a horse, and so on. And then the railways came, and that suddenly made the country smaller. Now we live in a world where you don't have to travel at all. Right. You and I, I don't know how many nautical miles apart, but quite a few thousand. Makes no difference. If I wanted to come and see you, I could get on a plane this evening and be with you in two days time, I guess. And so that option is available to me. So we've now got more tools at our disposal, and it will become a function of need, cost, and environmental pressure. How much of the world's resource am I willing to waste in the pursuit of what I want to do. And that will be the balancing.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:45.577 7292 is the answer. Yes.
Jeremy Hyman 00:24:48.906 There you go. That's what? 18 hours of travel? I guess 20 hours of travel? Something like that. That will be the new equation. I can do whatever I want to do, from sitting on my backside here and not going anywhere, right through to coming and meeting you. And can I afford to do it? Do I want to spend the money? Do I want to create the environmental footprint? Those are my criteria.
Stuart McLeod 00:25:08.748 Particularly as the time to do that reduces. Is it worth two days of travel there? Two days of travel back. It's only me, Jeremy. I mean, let's face it. You're probably not going to do that, but if it was--
Jeremy Hyman 00:25:20.984 Is there lunch involved? Maybe? Lunch and a beer. You could have half a sandwich. But you know what as well? I've noticed when I've been flying recently, there's an increased prevalence of WiFi and properly good WiFi. So actually, your dead time in the plane is now somewhat diminished.
Stuart McLeod 00:25:38.410 You're going to show my age here. Do you know what I miss? Eight hours of no WiFi and the concentration that that gives you, and I'm as guilty as anybody. I try. I try really hard. The multitasking you do when you've got internet. The best work I've ever done in my life is on an airplane with no WiFi.
Jeremy Hyman 00:25:58.064 Yeah. Let me ask you something about I'm trying to do something now, which is to have a little bit of a creative space. So occasionally, clients ask us to write a report for them or an analysis or whatever, which takes proper brain time. And you can shut down a load of things on your main computer so that you're not disturbed. You can switch on a focus mode. But actually, there's quite a lot of fiddling just to do that. So what I've been experimenting with is having another desk, another computer, no internet, no nothing. Just me wording. Kind of focused reading mode and just allowing myself to go over there and be creative and think for an hour, two hours, three hours, whatever it's going to be, and produce output without interruption and without distraction.
Stuart McLeod 00:26:43.638 I like it. Do you leave your phone behind, and how have you found it?
Jeremy Hyman 00:26:48.989 Liberating number one, which has been very useful and productive because your brain needs some time to be just your brain and not on multitasking, multiprocessing everything. I have a little bit of it as well. I'm Orthodox Jewish, which means that on a Saturday, no phone, no email, no nothing. So I get the concept of absolute isolation from the kind of modern communication. But this is more nuanced because this is using technology and being productive and working but doing it in an undisturbed fashion. And I think also clients understand it. If they try and get a hold of you and you say, I'm sorry, but I'm thinking about something and doing some work. That's what it says when you're out of office. I think most of them think, yeah, that's a good idea. I should be doing that. It's great.
Stuart McLeod 00:27:32.010 In that same vein, the most effective technique-- I haven't tried that. I like that idea. The thing that I got the most value out of is Pomodoro technique.
Jeremy Hyman 00:27:45.651 I'm not familiar with that.
Stuart McLeod 00:27:46.561 Basically, it says, okay, here's 25 minutes, and you are just going to do one thing, right, and then you're going to take a break for 5 minutes. You can do whatever. And then you're going to do it again, and then you're going to do it again. And what I find when you really concentrate and when you really do it effectively, you can stop multitasking. You can just ignore everything else. You just turn your phone over. Do that thing that you do. You just put your editor up or whatever, and you've got that little ticker in your ear. And it's a proven technique to focus. It's actually quite effective, but it does take practice, and you're just going to block out that, say, an hour and a half or whatever it is that you're going to do, and it says, okay, I'm just going to do one thing.
Jeremy Hyman 00:28:38.650 You know what? It's a wider malaise. We assume that by doing many things at once, we get more done, and by putting in more hours, we deliver more. And I don't know.
Stuart McLeod 00:28:48.384 Is it an assumption or just something that we've just been fucking sucked into by Apple and Google and Facebook?
Jeremy Hyman 00:28:56.495 Yeah, I don't know. Part of it is that we can lay the blame at technology's door, for sure. But I'm not sure that-- I'll tell you an interesting example. Lots of firms that we work with from time to time have a security breach. Yeah. Why did I have a security breach? Because someone clicked the link in an email, and everyone's like, oh, you should be doing security awareness training, and you should do this. And have you not used this phishing test or whatever? I'm like, yeah, we do all of that. But you know what? This guy who just clicked on it. This girl just got 12 things in her head at that point. Yeah, or a client yelling. Got a target you're meant to meet, a thing for me, an email from home, a text from things saying the delivery is coming in two minutes' time and you're not home. All of that. And their sin in all of this was they clicked a link on an email that looked 99% accurate. So don't give me the whole they should have been trained. They've been trained. Right. But we're asking them--
Stuart McLeod 00:29:45.888 [crosstalk] doing something else during the training.
Jeremy Hyman 00:29:49.696 [Whatever?].
Stuart McLeod 00:29:51.972 You're right, though.
Jeremy Hyman 00:29:52.681 But you know what I mean?
Stuart McLeod 00:29:53.229 I do. I absolutely do.
Jeremy Hyman 00:29:54.895 Of course, they clicked it. Anyone would click it.
Stuart McLeod 00:29:57.150 The thing that annoys me is ethics creep. Let's call it that, right? So the best is--
Jeremy Hyman 00:30:07.031 Is that a person? The ethics creep, or you don't mean that, do you?
Stuart McLeod 00:30:11.056 You got to keep him away from your daughters.
Jeremy Hyman 00:30:14.402 Come in, yeah. [inaudible] on the internet. Go on. What do you mean by that?
Stuart McLeod 00:30:18.429 I mean like the red dot in Slack is the best example. Right?
Jeremy Hyman 00:30:25.730 Right. Go on.
Stuart McLeod 00:30:25.923 They know because they were gamers, they know what attracts your attention. They know what brings you back into the application, and the red dot in the notification gets your attention. You cannot ignore it. Right. And could they have made an ethical choice to say, I'm going to make it a blue dot? Because a blue dot is not going to generate the same level of addiction and endorphin that says, and it's that same fucking tick, tick, tick, or whatever it is. That fucking annoying noise that I will absolutely rule out of this company if I can possibly do it. It's the same you've got mail. It's the same endorphin rush, and every particularly corporate and let's forget consumer now because they're morally bankrupted themselves anyway. But enterprise - call it social companies - have allowed consumer habits to populate the enterprise and command and demand your attention. And to your point, people just get so sucked into. I mean, I've got 15 tabs open here, and I am giving you my full attention. But it has crept from the consumer into the enterprise, and it is a constant demand for your attention. I know why they do it. I mean, they sold to Salesforce for 23 billion or whatever they sold for. That red dot is probably 22 billion of it. Right. I get it. I understand.
Jeremy Hyman 00:32:07.458 I think there's room for it. You use the word ethics creep. I think it's fine, provided you counteract it with duration that is reasonable. So let me give you an example. On my phone, I can put it into do not disturb, but I can also say unless it's one of these people. So I am reasonably saying that if my elderly mom rings, I don't mind what I'm doing. I do want to be disturbed. So your red dot challenge is kind of okay as long as the reason they show you the red dot is valid. Yeah. So the worst reason they could [inaudible] you is that something they want you to do that you don't want to do? But if they constrain that alert to being something that you've said to the system, actually, I do want to know about this. Then maybe I've got a bit more tolerance for that, I guess. It's a bit like when you're on holiday, right. Stuart, if you take a vacation, a bit of a break, there are some things that you just don't want to know about. There are some things that you absolutely do want to know about. Otherwise, you'll worry while you're on vacation because you don't know about them.
Stuart McLeod 00:33:12.676 I do worry. What about you? Can you do your vacations okay?
Jeremy Hyman 00:33:17.459 Well, I really would rather you didn't ask me that. I went through a phase of being particularly good at it. Most of my life was very bad at it. Then I went through a phase of being really good at it and having a tremendous sense of perspective and calmness. But I feel that over the past two years, that has ebbed away a bit. I've become a bit too nervy, I guess, which is not-- I don't recognize that in myself normally, but I have recognized that creeping up again, interestingly.
Stuart McLeod 00:33:49.002 COVID in the world has made us more on edge. Right. More anxious.
Jeremy Hyman 00:33:55.162 Yeah. More edgy. Because we thought we knew what was next. And actually, subtly, we thought that all of the worst stuff that could happen had probably already happened. Have you ever visited Japan?
Stuart McLeod 00:34:06.921 I haven't been to Japan. No, Jeremy.
Jeremy Hyman 00:34:08.937 Okay. If ever you go, a very interesting country. I went to Hiroshima. I went to visit Hiroshima. I'm not sure how you pronounce it, except with my British imperialist view. I know that it should be Hiroshima. Whatever they think in Japan, it is. It's actually Hiroshima because [crosstalk].
Stuart McLeod 00:34:23.121 As self-aware men once said, yes.
Jeremy Hyman 00:34:27.217 Self-aware British ex-imperialist. Anyway, I was there, and the overriding sense I had in Hiroshima was of a town having a party, which is the least likely thing. Right. But that was the undercurrent-- they had lovely-- they had an exhibition of lights and party here and a pub there, whatever. And basically, the attitude that I think they had was we thought of the worst thing that could possibly happen, and it's already happened. And therefore, party on. I'm not saying that there's obviously some very somber bits of the city and whatever. I think we as a kind of quite advanced Western culture, making some money, being able to buy the luxury goods that we want, travel where we like, whatever. We got this sorted. Right. And then, we have a global pandemic, and then we have a war, which has a disproportionate impact, not just on the people living there but on the whole world. And we find ourselves on the brink of a far worse situation than we might have imagined. And absolutely, that makes people edgy. And it absolutely saps the confidence that we are somehow masters of our own destiny. And we've got things pretty sorted.
Jeremy Hyman 00:35:30.266 Look at your example. You couldn't go to Australia - which you could have done for $1,000 get on the plane - for two years, and there was nothing you could do about it. Nothing. How unempowering is that?
Stuart McLeod 00:35:42.374 Very. And it causes family rifts. It causes anxiety. It causes grandparents -- two years for a grandparent is a lot more-- feels like a lot longer than--
Jeremy Hyman 00:35:55.402 Two long years.
Stuart McLeod 00:35:56.041 Yeah. They're too long years. And a 10-year-old because they're on the other end of the time spectrum.
Jeremy Hyman 00:36:03.464 So I'm going to turn your ethical point back on you as a software visionary, and I'm going to go for veterans in this space since you've used that phrase without any warning for me. But I think it's incumbent then, and it's a responsibility of a good CTO, good software designer, or whatever it's going to be deliver the one thing to professionals that they need, which is a mechanism for them to spend their time as wisely as possible. Right. Everything else you can buy pretty much. Okay. Time you cannot. And once it's gone, it's gone. So systems ought to be saying, hang on a minute. You don't need to do that. I've got it. You don't need to type it in for the fourth time. I've dealt with it. You don't need to check this. I already did. What you do need to do is ring this person, and here's their number. Okay. And then, the IT system is the partner of the organic component, the partner of the human. And that, I think, is our responsibility to identify and deliver such systems.
Stuart McLeod 00:37:02.057 I agree. I agree that's fucking way easier said than done.
Jeremy Hyman 00:37:08.260 That's why everyone isn't doing it, right? Go stack shelves in Walmart. They will hire you tomorrow, Stuart, but you got to be the one in X thousand that does it.
Stuart McLeod 00:37:17.483 No. We try. I think we generally try. I think we've got an enormous amount of work to do, but I think we at Karbon generally try and do that. I think that there's a sort of feature function. We can edge closer. But it's not until you have a big, big business with a lot of data and a lot of resource, a lot of money, and a lot of smart people that you can actually deliver big chunks of time back to people. It's really not about big chunks. It's about 1%, 1%, 1%, and the 1% add up over time.
Jeremy Hyman 00:37:53.729 For sure. I'm not saying everyone can do it, by the way. I'm saying that even those people that are enabled to do it don't go and do it. So defining the mission, say, I've got all this resource, got the business, I've got the data, I've got everything. Where do I direct it? That's where the responsibility comes.
Stuart McLeod 00:38:07.272 It's a cultural thing, too, right?
Jeremy Hyman 00:38:09.140 Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:38:09.820 It depends on your building for, right. If you're CCH [and?] Thompson and Iris, maybe, who are you building for? You're building for your shareholders. You're not building for your fucking customers anymore. Right. You just don't give a shit. And so, we're not building for our shareholders. We love our shareholders. We want them to make money, but we're building for our customers, and that's who we care about.
Jeremy Hyman 00:38:34.048 I don't think there are two different names. I think if you build for customers the right way, then you're building for your shareholders. It's the same.
Stuart McLeod 00:38:40.306 Yeah, well, that's our view. It's ultimately not the view of those that still send faxes for their renewals. Right. These companies have forgotten how to build software. They don't fucking know how to build software.
Jeremy Hyman 00:38:54.954 Well, when was last time they built? It was 25 years ago. I have a luxury that you don't have, which is I just advise. I don't actually have to do the software build. Right. I've had a history of being a software builder, and I know I'm not very good at it, which is fine. But my job is to advise and to steer and to give strategic direction. And it's interesting what you say about it being a cultural thing because people bring us in as a factional CTO or as a non-exec or to give some kind of different view at board level. And they're then surprised when most of our conversations are not about technology. Right. It's not about how many operations a second you can squeeze out of something or the bandwidth or the resilience because, to me, those are commodity items. The real difference is in close alignment between technology and people and what motivates people and the behaviors we want to drive. And then, I've got the extreme luxury of just saying, if you like all of this, ring Stuart, which is great. Right. Because then all of the actual delivery and the challenge and the bugs are somewhere else.
Stuart McLeod 00:39:52.872 Yes. And giving you all back all that time that we need. Hundreds of millions of dollars to build software, and around and around we go. Exactly.
Jeremy Hyman 00:40:00.654 Correct. Correct. I'm completely relaxed about that. But your comment is very telling, which is that the best technologists out there don't really get too involved in technology. Funnily enough, they get involved in people because they are way harder, way harder to lead.
Stuart McLeod 00:40:15.482 You advise 20 of the top 60 accounting firms in the UK. Where's the world going, Jeremy? Tell me. What's Jeremy's worldview?
Jeremy Hyman 00:40:23.653 I think that we have become too often slaves to our technology rather than leveraging it, and I think we are seeing a revolution where that gets upended. And funnily enough, you complained a bit about the consumer end of things. I think a lot of it is driven by the consumer end of things. People have an experience on their iPad, on their phone.
Stuart McLeod 00:40:43.639 I just question whether that's a great thing. For a lot of things, it's good. The consumer end of the enterprise trend has been happening for a while, and it's a good thing on the whole.
Jeremy Hyman 00:40:53.617 I think so. People walk around with a phone in their pocket, which basically they really quite like. They've dropped $1,000 on it, and they've got it as their constant companion and really, on the whole, enjoy it. Then they come to work with one of their legacy platform systems and hate it, right, because it's making them work in a way that isn't natural. So I think that the next wave of technology is the enabler technology. The one that says, do you know what? We just remembered you were human. Right. And therefore, we will support you in being the best human you can, rather than trying to make you a part of the machine.
Stuart McLeod 00:41:26.038 We can change our tag to Karbon building human software. There you go.
Jeremy Hyman 00:41:29.516 Yeah. There's worse things. So I think that's what's next. And just easing up a bit on the kind of monolithic, here's the system. This is what you do. Here's the training. Carry on. And much, much closer to--
Stuart McLeod 00:41:44.466 Can I fit more data on the screen? Is there a pixel left that I can fit something on?
Jeremy Hyman 00:41:50.643 Yeah, it's just dreadful, isn't it? And a bit more of like, we're just enabling you to be a better you. We're helping you to be a better you. You've got lots of talent and lots of skill. We're just boosting your capacity. We're just helping you in that direction. That's where software needs to be. My favorite example, by the way, Stuart, is the system that's most used by most people and the whole globe every day, which is Google as a search engine. At a very simple level, the Google interface is one box and one button. And Google basically say, type in here what you want and press this button, and we'll do the heavy lifting for you. I appreciate they spent more on their software than CCH did, but still.
Stuart McLeod 00:42:28.369 There's a lot of pressure during that, probably 20 years ago, 15 years ago, for them to put a lot more on that screen. There's extensive articles about that, and they resisted. And obviously, that was the right choice because remember Lycos and Yahoo and [Jeeves?]. Millennials, they won't even know how to spell those things right. But they just had so much shit on their screen that nobody knew what was up from down. Right. And Google went out the end of the day. At one stage, some of those search firms had more data to search through and were cataloging the web better and all that kind of stuff.
Jeremy Hyman 00:43:11.449 Yeah. There were all sorts. There was Ask Jeeves. There was Alta Vista.
Stuart McLeod 00:43:15.519 Yes. Yes, I love it. I love it.
Jeremy Hyman 00:43:19.918 Yeah. Some names. I remember going in about 1990-something to a CIO at a law firm in London, and he brought up Google, and I said, what's that? I've never seen that. He said this is the future. I was like, yeah, I've never heard of it. It will never go anywhere. So with my usual flare of technology prediction. Yeah. But, yeah, I think that simplicity of design is what we're talking about. It let the computer do the heavy lift. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:43:47.473 The lesson, I just went to Alta Vista. It was obviously bought by Yahoo a million years ago. And the screen is covered in shit. It's got all kinds of-- it's got a photo of some creek somewhere, and it's got ads. It's got like, there you go. Some people never learn.
Jeremy Hyman 00:44:07.337 I'm going to bring it up as well. Have a look at it. I didn't know it still existed.
Stuart McLeod 00:44:10.839 Amazing, right?
Jeremy Hyman 00:44:11.438 Yeah, it is a mess.
Stuart McLeod 00:44:14.966 There you go. It's the CCH of search engines.
Jeremy Hyman 00:44:18.755 Yeah. So in response to your question, I think we're going for the computer does more so the human can do more being a human. And that really is a mantra that hasn't changed in my 25 years of doing this. It's just the technology catching up and supporting it.
Stuart McLeod 00:44:34.026 How the firms that you've advised cope with COVID and new normal, etc.?
Jeremy Hyman 00:44:39.819 The honest answer is that they've done very well. There was a phrase wasn't there in the war when they said he had a good war, which meant that actually they kind of did all right with it. I would never minimize the huge human toll of COVID. You've seen families decimated, and whole community is really reduced, and it's terrible. But I suppose I am at heart an optimist. I look for the good in everything. And quite a lot of what COVID drove was honesty. Right. So we had got ourselves into a stage where we weren't really honest with ourselves as businesses. Making enough money to not have to worry about some stuff. We've got some staff that maybe really we should have had honest conversations with, but just leave well enough alone. And COVID was a very harsh light that got shone on things, and it caused firms to really reevaluate some of the decisions that they've made and be a bit braver than had ever been before. And I would say that they have benefited from those decisions overall. Worryingly, I see people drifting back into their old ways now and not being quite so sharp and not being quite so tight and not being quite so honest. And it will be interesting to see which firms take what they learned from, let's call it, the COVID era and use it to their betterment going forward and which ones sort of lapse back to where they were.
Stuart McLeod 00:46:11.866 Do you think was there a big difference between how big firms and small firms coped, or do you think it was more related to the culture that they engendered pre-COVID?
Jeremy Hyman 00:46:23.358 I think big firms tended to cope better because they were more dispassionate about some of the decisions that they made. Where smaller firms are a bit too cozy, maybe, to have been able to make good decisions or lack the management apparatus to be able to make and execute a decision. You'll have to find them in bigger firms. So I think maybe firms that was sort of 50 and smaller or 75 and smaller struggled a bit more. Firms that were sort of 200 or bigger tended to be pretty comfortable doing it and also had just a bit more wherewithal and confidence to be able to make a decision along with it. I think that's what I've seen. The challenge that we have now is that a lot of firms, teams are exhausted. You hinted at the great resignation before, but actually, people are just exhausted. They've been running at 120% for two years. They've undertaken change at a rate of knots that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing. Projects that were for one day maybe got done in three weeks, and now they need a rest. They need a break. They need a bit of a reset. They need some time to recover.
Stuart McLeod 00:47:31.908 They are reevaluating their life, their values, and where their workplace fits in with that value system.
Jeremy Hyman 00:47:38.408 Yeah. And I don't think it needs a great resignation. I think that's an overreaction. But what it needs is an honest conversation with colleagues, with managers, with staff, underneath managers, and with clients. No, I don't advise one small sole practitioner never went on a holiday. You talked about vacation before. They never went on holiday because always terrified that clients can do something and then what they're going to do and whatever. I said, go away for a week. Yeah. And on your out of office thing saying we're having a week off to reset so that I can work for you better when I come back. If you really need me, you can text me, but otherwise, please leave me alone for a week. I said I guarantee you will not lose a client. In fact, you'll get some clients who will send your out office to someone else and say, look what my accountant says. It's great. And that's what it was. The need for that honest dialogue and reminding everyone that every end of the equation that, you're just human, and there are certain things you can do and things that you can't. And it doesn't mean that you're a bad adviser or that the world's going to end. It just means that some things can't get done right now. It's a mature relationship then, isn't it, with a client, if you have that. I don't see any harm to it. And the truth is, just to add to that, if you have got a client that doesn't like that, you're better off without them, frankly, because at some point down the line, it's only going to bite you. So better off to discover that now and politely say goodbye.
Stuart McLeod 00:48:56.948 In terms of all that, though, like putting all that in a bow, how do you look at your business this year? What's next for Jeremy, and what's next for the accounting firms that you advise?
Jeremy Hyman 00:49:10.526 So we've been very busy through the pandemic. We grew 35%, 40%. Something like that; was massive growth. And I have been fortunate to surround myself with some very talented associates who've got complementary skills. Complementary skills is a great euphemism. It means they're better at it than I am. Right. That's what that means. We'll say complementary skills, and we will continue to grow and reach. It's not about winning new clients from the people we know. It's about winning clients from the people we don't know and making ourselves known to them and bring them on board, and showing them that some independent advice in the technology arena is valuable in terms of technology, but really is valuable in terms of their practice. And what's next for our clients? Our clients will grow not in size but in profitability and in quality of work, and how much they enjoy working with their clients and with their colleagues. Those are the metrics for me.
Stuart McLeod 00:50:04.555 Yeah. We always find the accountants that are happiest, the ones that are most productive, the ones with the best morale, the ones that we enjoy getting, the ones that we enjoy supporting and growing with are the ones that are just helping the clients that they want to help. They don't have these miserable clients that annoy the shit out of them. They are on a journey that they enjoy. That they love. They're with friends, colleagues, and peers and clients that they're operating in a world that they get energy from. And I think that's what you're saying. You're using your skills, your background, your experience to advise and technology that can just help them be better people, right?
Jeremy Hyman 00:50:44.344 Yeah. And the ones that enjoy that we enjoy working for and the ones that don't, that's fine as well. Not everyone has to be a client, but you want the people that are to really appreciate what you do, and you want to appreciate them back. That's how it works.
Stuart McLeod 00:50:59.622 Hey Jeremy, this hour's flown by. Has been amazing catching up.
Jeremy Hyman 00:51:05.113 I do love chatting with you, and I love catching up with you, and I'm slightly worried about how much I agree with what you said, but we can work on that.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:11.982 You'll reflect, and so we can do a follow-up and say we'll disagree with 34 out of the 37 things you said.
Jeremy Hyman 00:51:22.252 Nothing wrong with that. Good. Well, look after yourself, my friend Stuart, and I look forward to catching up in virtually or physically or whatever. The next occasion that finds us in one another's orbit will be great.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:31.840 I'd love to, Jeremy. Thank you.
Jeremy Hyman 00:51:34.689 Take care. Bye-bye.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:42.478 Thanks for listening to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting, fun, you'll find lots more to help you run a successful accounting firm at Karbon Magazine. There are more than 1,000 free resources there, including guides, articles, templates, webinars, and more. Just head to karbonhq.com/resources. I'd also love it if you could leave us a five-star review. Wherever you listen to this podcast, let us know you liked this session. We'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining, and see you in the next episode of The Accounting Leaders podcast.