Arguing Influence

At one time or another we’ve all participated in what I call “bar arguments.”

Whether debating over who was the best centerfielder or quarterback of all time, to who was the worst (add your own noun here – i.e. athlete, politician, musician).

As a 25 year veteran of the publishing industry, I’ve participated in compiling a number of issues in several industries that attempted to rank spheres of influence usually in groups of 50 or 100. They ranged from companies to individuals to products and, as with any ranking, it was admittedly part concrete and other parts subjective.

At my former stop before landing here, we put out an annual ranking of whom we considered the 100 most influential people in the accounting profession. Those selections were drawn from fairly diverse fields of pursuit from practitioners to vendors as well as politicians and educators.

If my math is correct I oversaw roughly 11 of those issues and on balance I felt we offered a reasonably accurate overview of who wielded influence and by omission, which didn’t.

However as these things go, sometimes a real danger is when a reputation that had been stellar some years before, gets grandfathered in without current merit. I’m loathe to use a hackneyed phrase but often the criteria should be “what have you done for me lately?”

It’s sort of like when the fans named baseball great Willie Mays to the 1973 All-Star team when the reality was he could barely run.

One inclusion to this year’s list is purportedly the head of a digital-based concern who was unable to explain in basic terms to an inquiring practitioner how one of today’s top emerging technology works. Another has been retired from day to day practice for several years and shares more pictures on social media of golf outings and family vacations than anything else.

To be fair we all have our personal definition of influence.

One of my earliest “influencers” was my first supervisor when I toiled as a movie usher for the then-minimum wage of $1.85 an hour, who instilled in me the critical importance of preparation. Another former colleague demonstrated by virtue of drawing a clock face on a piece of paper how change doesn’t have to be a 24-hour shift, but can be effective in 5 minute increments.

But, as with any list, there are sure to be debates, some enthusiastic and others probably more emotional. But that’s the fun of it, so feel free to come out of your corners arguing.