{"id":4197,"date":"2015-11-01T21:37:09","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T02:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2016\/02\/11\/what-really-matters-president-davis-lecture\/"},"modified":"2022-11-07T14:43:30","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T19:43:30","slug":"what-really-matters-president-davis-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/what-really-matters-president-davis-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"“What Really Matters?” President Davis Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Furman President Elizabeth Davis<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Really Matters?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

November 17, 2015<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is a privilege and honor to stand before you and deliver my thoughts about what really matters.\u00a0 It\u2019s also quite humbling as many presenters in this series have so rightly pointed out.\u00a0 For 33 years, we have honored the legacy of LD Johnson through this series, and our community has been blessed by the wisdom of some of the finest minds on campus.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll confess at one point thinking, certainly someone over these past 33 years hit it right\u2014clearly articulating what really matters.\u00a0 Maybe we should just read that essay over and over.\u00a0 Of course, there are some problems with that strategy.\u00a0 First, we probably couldn\u2019t offer CLP credit for reading one essay.\u00a0 But more importantly, that passive, individualized exercise goes against one of the very things I understand Dr. Johnson was so well known for\u2014asking us as a community to stop and reflect on who we are and what we are about.\u00a0 And hearing from our own community members offers a way of knowing each other that we don\u2019t often experience.<\/p>\n

So again, I\u2019m privileged, honored and humbled to be among those who have searched for wisdom and answers to this most important and pressing question.<\/p>\n

This past month, I was pressed to think about what really matters and not because I had this speech tonight, but because of two specific events.\u00a0 The first was a memorial service for my friend and colleague Diana Garland.\u00a0 Diana was the dean of the school of social work at Baylor University.\u00a0 She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 65.\u00a0 At her service, we heard the eulogy virtues, as David Brooks calls them.\u00a0 Eulogy virtues are different from resume virtues. Yes, at memorial services, we all lament that in our daily lives we aren\u2019t working on our eulogy virtues.\u00a0 But if hearing the good works of a social worker was all the service was about, I wouldn\u2019t have made the in-and-out trip to Waco.\u00a0 Diana\u2019s death rocked me to my core.\u00a0 Social workers and accountants don\u2019t think alike.\u00a0 Social workers and academic administrators don\u2019t think alike.\u00a0 That Diana and I were dear friends might be a bit unusual.\u00a0 But I will tell you, Diana changed me.\u00a0 She changed how I think about making a difference in this world.\u00a0 Lots of people want to make a difference\u2026and they\u2019re terrible at it.\u00a0 Because making a difference requires more than a heart.\u00a0 It requires a head.\u00a0 Diana taught me what it means to intellectually understand the sociological, environmental, economical, and theological implications of doing good.<\/p>\n

The other event was much more up-lifting.\u00a0 It was the ordination service of Maria Swearingen and Sally Sarratt.\u00a0 Baptists have ordination services to officially recognize the calling of members to ministry in the name of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of stuff that happens leading up to an ordination.\u00a0 Not just everyone is ordained.\u00a0 But those who are have demonstrated a faith and commitment worthy of the congregation\u2019s blessing.\u00a0 A calling into the ministry is not easy.\u00a0 It\u2019s a calling to serve, care, and preach the good news.\u00a0 It is a 24-7 job that is all about others.<\/p>\n

When I think about Diana and Maria and Sally and what really matters, I\u2019m humbled.\u00a0 I\u2019ll confess to a slight inferiority complex.\u00a0 I am trained as an accountant.\u00a0 I\u2019m not one of those people who help others in times of deepest need.\u00a0 But over the years, I have come to accept my gifts as they are.\u00a0 And tonight, perhaps I will persuade you that thinking like an accountant is not necessarily a bad thing.<\/p>\n

Accountants are historians.\u00a0 I bet most if not all of you have never thought about accountants that way.\u00a0 Now, speaking just for me, I\u2019m not nearly the elegant historian that, say Marian Strobel or Savita Nair are.\u00a0 But in preparing financial statements, accountants report in numerical form the aggregation of events that happened in the past.\u00a0 When I read financial statements, I can surmise what happened and what didn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 The three major financial statements, the balance sheet, the income statement, and the statement of cash flows, explain a different piece of the history.\u00a0 The story is incomplete without each one.\u00a0 While each statement has its own style and purpose, they are inextricably linked.\u00a0 They are connected, and understanding how one informs and is informed by another is an important part of understanding the history.<\/p>\n

The income statement and statement of cash flows tell a version of recent history.\u00a0 Typically, it\u2019s what happened in the past year.\u00a0 The balance sheet is an accumulation of events or history over many years, typically the life of the organization.\u00a0 While an income statement and statement of cash flows start fresh every year, the balance sheet is merely adjusted year to year.\u00a0 Old experiences aren\u2019t forgotten, but are built upon each new year.<\/p>\n

The goal of creating financial statements is to provide information that is useful to existing and potential investors, creditors and other lenders for decision making.\u00a0 To facilitate putting these historical accounts together, the professional body has articulated two qualitative characteristics that these records should possess:\u00a0 relevance and faithful representation.\u00a0 For financial statements to be relevant, they need to have predictive value and be of a nature that matters.\u00a0 We call that materiality.\u00a0 For financial statements to meet faithful representation, they should be complete, neutral and free from errors.<\/p>\n

Enhancing these characteristics are the qualities of comparability, verifiability, timeliness, and understandability.\u00a0 I suppose if an accountant were asked what really matters to the profession, it would be that we can be relied upon to understand the needs of the user, our audience, so that we might present information that is helpful, reliable and trustworthy.<\/p>\n

While it may appear to the untrained eye that accountants merely follow a bunch of rules, adding and subtracting, it\u2019s more complicated than that. Professional judgment is required to meet the standards. In fact, a major decades-long debate in the profession focuses on whether accountants should follow rules or principles in the preparation of financial statements.<\/p>\n

Rules, for the most part, appear to take away a lot of judgment of the accountant, especially when it comes to meeting the quality of faithful representation.\u00a0 Rules can be manipulated to achieve what an organization wants to report — meeting the letter of the law as opposed to the spirit of the law.<\/p>\n

Principles, on the other hand, can affect the comparability of results between organizations.\u00a0 Agreeing on principles is difficult, and defending principles when an organization has suffered losses is even more difficult.\u00a0 For the educators in the room, think about creating a syllabus or a university policy.\u00a0 I think back to my first syllabus.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t too long\u2014here are the learning objectives for the course, here are the assignments, here is how your grade is going to be determined.\u00a0 Maybe 2 or 3 pages.\u00a0 Principles, if you will.\u00a0 Then, after enough disagreements with students about what the syllabus does or doesn\u2019t say, rules get added.\u00a0 Make-up tests need to be arranged ahead of time.\u00a0 Homework is due at the beginning of class.\u00a0 Rules begin to take over.\u00a0 The syllabus grows in length.\u00a0 And before long, we\u2019ve lost the purpose behind what the course is designed to accomplish.\u00a0 It becomes a series of obstacles to overcome rather than a cohesive set of experiences that together meet learning objectives that, in concert with other courses and experiences, create transformative learning experiences for students.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s get back to accounting.\u00a0 I was always good at accounting.\u00a0 I had no idea before I went to college that I would end up majoring in accounting.\u00a0 I started out in computer science.\u00a0 I really didn\u2019t know what that would entail, but it was one of those cool, newish majors back in 1980.\u00a0 I have shared with my computer science colleagues that I liked what I perceived to be the logic of computer science, but I didn\u2019t like the rules or the syntax to code programs a particular way.\u00a0 Those of you who might have taken a Fortran class a long, long time ago may know what I mean.\u00a0 So I switched to something less picky than computer science\u2014accounting.<\/p>\n

For me, accounting was like a big puzzle, and I have always enjoyed puzzles, especially logic puzzles.\u00a0 I like to figure out how things work together.\u00a0 Early on in my career at Arthur Andersen, I would be sent in to unravel some of the messiest accounts within our client records. I guess someone discovered that I could walk into an unfamiliar situation and figure out what was going on.\u00a0 I could infer the history that led to the present situation. In an effort to sound really interesting, the term forensic accounting has started to take hold for these kinds of investigations.\u00a0 Marketing, it\u2019s all marketing.<\/p>\n

At the same time, I realized that the staff I was supervising didn\u2019t have the same understanding of accounting that I did.\u00a0 Many of them were merely following directions without a clear sense of why<\/u> they were doing what<\/u> they were doing.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to adapt in a dynamic environment if you don\u2019t know why you\u2019re doing what you\u2019re doing.\u00a0 Or if you don\u2019t know how to interpret information within a particular context.\u00a0 So I decided to enter academia so I could help teach the \u201cwhy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because I so enjoy understanding how things work together to produce a result, I tend to want others to experience that same joy.\u00a0 As I look back on each of the various administrative roles I\u2019ve held in academia, I notice a common theme of bringing people together to understand how and why things work a particular way, so we might collectively improve.\u00a0 It matters to me that the groups with which I work share a common understanding and a common purpose.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to work toward a common good when we don\u2019t or aren\u2019t willing to consider how the various pieces contribute to the whole.<\/p>\n

While some accountants will focus on historical events, others take the role of prognosticators, imagining what could be.\u00a0 Typically, these prognostications or forecasts predict financial results if certain actions are taken\u2014if we invest in this asset, our income statement will look like this. \u00a0If we add a product line, our income statement will look like this.\u00a0 The math is easy; the assumptions that inform the math are critical.\u00a0 Predicting or imagining what could <\/u>be requires a great understanding of current reality, how internal and external forces work together, and full consideration of the various trade-offs that could arise as decisions are made.\u00a0 Predicting or imagining what should<\/u> be requires a commitment to the principles or values driving an organization.<\/p>\n

And now I\u2019m called upon to lead an institution as we decide what could be and what should be. \u00a0How I<\/u> go about that is determined in part by the experiences that have formed me these last 53 years, or at least these last 23 in higher education. \u00a0How does our institutional history inform the directions we should take?\u00a0 How do our individual<\/u> histories affect our contributions to shared aspirations or even our ability to create shared aspirations?<\/p>\n

Those of you who know me or have had to listen to me over this past year know that I am very fond of the aspirations set forth in our character and values statement.\u00a0 How fitting that LD Johnson developed our statement, essentially declaring what really matters to us as an institution.<\/p>\n

Some of my favorite phrases, paraphrased, from our character and values statement are:<\/p>\n