It’s streaming music, he explained.  It’s called Pandora.

When we got to the airport I started reading the NYT (on my new Kindle, I might add) and lo and behold there was a big article in the business section on Pandora.

And today, I went out to the Pandora website and signed up for my free account.  It was meant to be.

What is it?

It’s customized streaming music.  From your Pandora account you set up “radio stations,” that are based on your favorite music.  I’ve set up three so far:  The Beatles, Miles Davis, and Aretha Franklin.  You can add other artists to the station.  My Miles Davis station also includes Johnny Hodges, Stan Getz, Dave Brubeck, etc.

With that information, the Pandora software goes out to its library of 700,00o titles and streams music to you on your “station” based on the information you’ve provided.  But you’re not limited to the artists you put into your station profile.  My Miles Davis station, which I’m listening to now, is streaming Chet Baker.

It’s unbelievable.  A game changer.

And of course, I’m sitting here thinking about how this model can be applied to our profession.

I’ve only been using Pandora for the morning, so I really haven’t thought it through at all, but my initial instinct tells me that we need something like this for A&A research.

The basic problem Pandora solves is how to organize a veritable boatload of information to get you the stuff that you really want.  Isn’t that what A&A research is all about?

The FASB codification or something like Accounting Research Manager or 10K Wizart–those things are all designed to address the same issue.  But there are a couple of problems here.

• They don’t push you information to keep you current.  I guess ARM does, but it’s so general it doesn’t really matter because, even if you do open the email, you just skim it.
• The search engines aren’t all that great.  You still have to wade through a bunch of junk on your own before you finally get to that thing you’re most interested in.

The core issue with these older technologies is that content retrieval is not customized.  It’s loosely organized and then left up to the user to figure out what is most relevant.  These older technologies are not “smart.”  They don’t learn your habits.

Pandora is smart.  For example, right now I’m listening to Joe Lovano on my Miles Davis channel.  I’ve never heard of him before, but I’m digging this tune “Reflections,” which was recorded live at the Village Vanguard, a cathedral of jazz music.

There’s a button on my Pandora interface that I can click to say thumbs up or thumbs down.  I’m clicking thumbs up.  And that’s how Pandora learns and begins to refine my preferences more and more.  If you were to start a Miles Davis station today we might start out listening to some of the same stuff, but my guess is that over time, as we utilize the thumbs up/thumbs down options, our two stations will evolve in different directions.

This is what I want in my A&A research.  Give me an interface that does a lot of the heavy lifting for me, that has a deep understanding of what I’m really trying to find and that get’s me where I need to go quickly.

Of course the problem is volume of customers.  There are something like 350,000 CPAs, which might seem like a lot of potential users.  There are 48 million Pandora users.

I don’t think we’ll be seeing any VC money any time soon.  But it’s nice to think about.

A game changer?  A qualified yes.

First, the disappointments.  The Kindle store overall is a drag.  I wouldn’t put it in the “Soviet 7-11″ category of bare shelves and stale bread.  But it wasn’t what I expected.  The newsstand is pretty thin:  no Sports Illustrated or Vanity Fair or Golf Digest.  That’s 3 of my 5 airplane mags that aren’t available.

Newspapers, good selection there.  But books, a real disappointment.  The first two books I thought about buying weren’t available.  That would be Catcher in the Rye (can’t find my copy and wanted to read it after Salinger died) and Invisible Man (been on my list for years).  So right away, the store loses credibility.

I’m also disappointed that you can’t scan the headlines of a newspaper or the articles in a magazine.  How would you know you would want to buy?  On the plus side, they do offer a free chapter or two from any book purchase.  And the blog selection doesn’t include any of my favorites.

That being said…it’s still a game changer.  Why?  Because it will change my reading habits for the better.

First, the hardware.  Outstanding reading experience.  Easy to use.  Fast.  Easy on the eyes.  Wish it had a backlit screen, but I can live without one.

I read the Saturday NYT this morning, and it really had the experience of reading a real newspaper.  A vast improvement over reading the paper online, mainly because it’s downloaded to the device, so you don’t have to wait for the Internet connection to load a page.  You can flip through just like you would a newspaper.  When I read the paper online, I’m much more selective about  the articles I choose because I know it will take some time to refresh the screen (especially on the phone).  I’ll read more articles off the Kindle.

And I’m convinced I’ll read more books, too.  Why?  Because they’re available right now (at least he ones that are in the store).  Last night I was trying to figure out what to read and couldn’t make up my mind.  So I sampled the first couple of chapters of Game Change, the book by Mark Helperin about the 2008 election.  Read the entire sample in one sitting and got hooked.  Will probably buy the book.

Books are now an impulse buy.  Not quite like iTunes because you’re still paying $9 a book vs. 99 cents for a song, but still an impulse buy.  That’s a game changer.

What will be great is when they come up with a device that satisfies all my reading needs.  The need for traditional, paper-based stuff plus the need for immediate, up-to-date content.  Oh yes…and the ability to read Andrew Sullivan and Sports Illustrated.

The strategy for these firms is to  push more of the responsibility for course development to their partners and staff.  On some level, I guess, it makes sense to think that someone who is an expert at something should be able to develop course materials.  But what most folks don’t realize is that instructional design is a highly specialized skill that not just anyone can do, even if they are a widely recognized expert in their technical field.

For you CPAs out there who are now tasked with developing a training course, I’d like to offer a couple of tips that hopefully will make your life easier.

Tip #1.  It all starts with the learning objective.  This is probably the most important thing I can tell you.  The biggest mistake I see SMEs make is that they approach training as a “brain dump.”  Their first move is to prepare a list of all the things they want to teach.  If they need to come up with a course on going concern, they’ll start by saying “we have to teach topic A, and B and C, etc.”  That’s how you get a course that’s really a brain dump.

Instead of focusing on topics, ask yourself, “at the end of this training session, what do I want these participants to be able to do that they weren’t able to do before?”  Those are your learning objectives.

As a result of taking your course on going concern, what is it that you want your participants to be able to do?  Some possibilities:

• Identify indicators of possible going concern problems
• Evaluate management’s plans for overcoming these problems
• Prepare an audit report and appropriate disclosures when substantial doubt exists

Notice that each of these objectives is built around a verb:  ”identify,” “evaluate,” “prepare.”

Crafting a good learning objective then sets up the rest of your course development.  If you want people to identify signs of going concern, then what is it you need to teach them?  How do you want to present the material?

Well, maybe you want them to be able to recognize going concern issues during the course of performing other audit procedures.  Say they’re performing an analytical review or a walkthrough of internal controls.  What might they run across while doing those tests that should tip them off that there’s a going concern problem.

The biggest problem a SME has in preparing a course is  that they know far too much about the subject matter.  The course development project becomes an exercise in the selection of small subsets of that subject matter and its presentation in a way that enables learning.  Having a clear set of learning objectives is the best way to do that.

Tip #2.  Ground your material in real world applications.  The ultimate goal of training is to improve job performance.  Somehow you need to get people to transfer what you cover in class to the job.  I’m sure that entire books have been written on this topic, but here are three techniques I use.

1. Tell stories.  Illustrate your point about going concern issues by describing the time you came across one on that job of yours.  Not all the stories have to be from your experience.  It can be just as effective to prod the participants to share their stories.  One of the beauties of live seminar training is that the participants engage with and learn from each other.
2. Simulate job experiences.  If you want people to be able to identify going concern issues while performing risk assessment procedures, set up a case study or class exercise that provides them with the kinds of things they would actually observe, examine, vouch, test, etc. on the job.
3. Tie things back to your forms and checklists.  I hate forms and the checklist mentality, but let’s be real–people rely on these in the field.  I promise you, if you’re doing a course on internal control, and you don’t explain to people how to complete the internal control forms, you’ll hear about it.

Once you start your development work, a lot more issues and questions will come up.  But if you start with these quick tips, you’ll be heading off in a good direction.

The place is dark.  It’s loud.  And it smells like a seventh grade boys locker room.  Not before they shower, after they shower, when everyone loads up on Brut, and the haze is so thick with the stuff you’d think a tear gas bomb went off.  In short, it’s a miserable place for an adult.

But the kids, apparently, love it.  Which is why Abercrombie creates the experience they do.

I call it obnoxious, but others call it brilliant.  Why?  Because teenagers don’t need their parents to shop.  They have their own money, and the freedom to spend it.  So what Abercrombie has done is isolate their target and speak directly to them.  Avoid the middle man, the parent.

The want to drive the parents away.  Bring the kids in on their own and, once they’ve got a captive audience, work their marketing magic to separate them from as much of their money as possible.

Aggressively targeting your audience.

The other day I saw a communications piece from a firm that highlighted the accounting treatment of FASB 141(r) and more specifically, how that applied to a bank’s acquisition of a failed institution that had been purchased by the FDIC.

The guys that wrote it certainly knew their stuff.  They went through all the debits and credits and even had a nice example to illustrate how to account for the transaction.  It was extremely well-done.

And it completely missed the point.

I was told it was a marketing piece, designed to drum up business for the firm’s M&A consulting practice.  If that’s the case, then I expect the piece to not be very effective.  Why?  Because it misidentified its targeted audience.

Here’ what I told my client.

Wouldn’t you want to be targeting the senior executives at the acquiring bank as early in the acquisition process as possible?  It makes more sense to me to position the firm as being able  to provide advice on a wide range of issues that should be considered by the acquirer up front.  That’s where the value is.  If I was running a bank, I’d want yo to tell me how to plan for the acquisition and structure it in a way that provides me with the greatest benefit.  I’ll pay for that.

The existing document is written by technical accountants and addressed to accountants.  It tells the reader how to account for the transaction after the fact.  It will help the firm communicate with their existing clients but I’m not sure how much it will help them getting new clients because the communication piece is positioned too late in the acquisition process.  By the time this piece is relevant, the bank has already chosen its advisors.

In many ways, a firm’s communications pieces go back to Composition 101:  audience, purpose, thesis.  Select a target; figure out why you’re communicating with them; make your case.

But measuring productivity as a writer is a much more subjective experience.  What are you supposed to do, count your pages?  Trust me, any writer would take one great page over 10 pages of slop any day.

I quickly learned how to gauge progress using other guidelines.  A good day of research was valuable.  Generating good ideas was valuable.  Heck…even generating bad ideas was worthwhile.  Sorting through my thoughts was extremely valuable.  One of the things you learn as a writer is that muddled writing is a result of muddled thinking.  If you want to write well, you need to have a clear understanding in your own mind of what it is you want to say.

So how, then, do we measure progress when we’re doing business development?

Many of my clients are wading into the biz dev world for the first time in years–maybe even the first time in their career.  I’m no different, and I recognize the difficulty, the frustration and even the discouragement that can come from spending so much of your time on the phone reaching out to people and pitching ideas.

How do you know you’ve had a good day when not one single person you’ve talked to said “Yes, we want to hire you.  When can you get started?”

Two things I’ve been telling my clients.

First.  Manage your expectations by developing a long-term view of things.  Selling services, especially expensive ones like accounting, will take a long time.  Recognize that there is a sequential process you need to work through.

1. Awareness.  People have to know about what you’re doing
2. Shape opinion.  They have to understand their needs and come to believe that you can provide value and help them achieve their goals
3. Call to action.  Agree on terms and close the deal

It’s important to recognize what phase you’re in and measure progress against that phase.  Work on making incremental progress to get to the next phase.

The other piece of advice I have is to remember that your communication with clients and prospects is a two-way street.  Spend as much time listening as you do talking.  Listen carefully to what your prospects are telling you and use that knowledge to better understand their needs and to refine your messaging.

People look to you for advice.  More than half the calls I make, people ask me “what are you seeing out there?  What are your thoughts on what’s happening?”  These are great questions to be getting.  It shows that people regard you as a thought leader.  You want these questions.

You need to be able to answer them, and the only way to do that is by getting out there, talking to people and listening to their story.

I had a great call with a client yesterday.  And all that came of it was a vague promise that we’d talk again in a few weeks.  The best part of the call was what I learned from her about her business, her challenges and the direction she wanted to take her firm.

Did I have the answers?  No.  But I had some thoughts and some things I shared that I’d learned from talking to other clients just like her.

In time, I’m sure only good things will come of all this.