[MUSIC] Today we'll be talking with Andrew Harding, who's chief executive management accounting, Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. Andrew has had a wide and varied career. Primarily, in recent times, in the field of accountancy. Do you have any examples of the decision-making skills and examples to go with them, that a management accountant, either trainee or actually, would need to be able to demonstrate, please? >> Yeah, let me tell you one in particular. I won't name the company, but I'll talk about the decision. And it was all about building a new line at a distillery in Scotland. And it was, what sort of line do we build? What are our objectives on this line? How do we build the best thing for the future of the business? And your traditional decision would have been, okay, what's it going to cost us? What money are we going to make from it? How does that all work? This decision was more sophisticated, though, because it brought into account, what's the water usage? What's the water wastage? What's water going to look like in 10, 20 years time? It's no longer free for us. Equally, what do we do with heat? How does that work in this process? So we're starting to look at, we're looking at things way beyond the money. You're looking at other impacts. You're anticipating future events, because you're talking about long-term success, long-term decisions. So this is part of, yeah, an increasingly complex, fast-moving world. Where assumptions we've lived with for centuries, we're questioning. And those have to be questioned day-to-day in the workplace and in that decision-making process. The result for that business was, they made the decision based on all of those things. And they now have the most efficient distillery operation in the world, best in class. Companies are now having to report on their utilization of resources, and that sort of thing. And that anticipation meant that that's becoming a huge tick in the box for investors. When they're looking at how well that business is managed, how well does it plan for the future. >> So in the context of being a management accountant, and the example that Andrew has just shared with us, we've had some very different aspects of decision-making shared with us. At one level, there's the objective here and now, real-time decision-making that needs to take place. But as we've learned with the example in the distillery, there's a need to project forward, and to bring in a level of productivity into decision making. But also to think about the broader implications of the decision that's being made, both for now and future. So for example, with water, and other resources are going to be needed in this case by the distillery. So that actually means, in terms of the management accountant role adding value, it can add value today and it can add value for the longer term. What is also really interesting, because if we look at the ever-changing shape of an organization. What it was a few years ago, what it was today, and what it might look like tomorrow, we would expect it to change. But the level of change is getting even more pronounced. So for example, management accountancy is going up and up in the organizational hierarchy in terms of its importance, in terms of its degree of influence. Also, you've got roles in IT, in procurement, in social media, all of which are becoming key functional roles in an organization. So what that means in terms of professional skills that you need to be able to identify, to be able to embrace, to be able to develop. You need to really start to think about which of these skills are going to benefit you. And in what part of an organization, not only today, but tomorrow, which means you need to be able to predict what the organization of tomorrow might start to look like. Thank you Andrew. [MUSIC]