Handcuffs and audit - there must be a link
What could be the best possible background for being a successful accountant? Yesterday I came across the second highly successful accountant this month to tell me they had started working life in a police force.
It got me thinking – what’s so special about the police? The uniforms? The initiation rituals? (That last one may be my own imagination) Could it be the power of arrest?
As far I could tell few of these things have anything in common with being an accountant. But then it struck me, perhaps the connection between the cops and the bean counters is a natural disposition to be an authority figure. That is, both want to wear big boots.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Some accountants have more in common with entrepreneurs, and I know one accountant who prefers Jimmy Choos (admittedly a consultant), so the boots analogy is not entirely accurate. Having said that, of the two accountants who revealed their past lives feeling collars one was an auditor and the other is now a top forensic accountant. Those roles have got authority, if not bossy, written all over them. They also have the role of enforcer about them. And behind that, I suspect, a sense of fairness and justice. Oh, and possibly a liking for handcuffs (I made that up).
Does make me wonder though what other previous lives are behind the UK’s accountants.