Doing the Asking

By Ben Towne, CPA

It’s now well into vacation season, so I’ll make this message brief! Thank you to everyone for making June a great month for our chapter! There were many great events, including our successful estate planning symposium, presented jointly with the CalCPA Peninsula Silicon Valley Chapter, and our installation banquet gave us the opportunity to thank our prior year’s officers for their tremendous leadership—and of course to eat wonderful culinary treats and enjoy some excellent wine!

For me, the highlight from June was the CalCPA Council meeting in Anaheim, where Conrad Davis was installed as CalCPA’s 2010-11 chair. In addition to all that was accomplished at the meeting, it gave those who attended a chance to meet with old friends. It was also great to see the extent of participation by our chapter. We had our four council seats, as well as representation from our chapter’s state committee chairs. We also had two of our chapter members—Amy Ainsworth and Ariel Cretu—selected to serve on the CalCPA Board this year. Congratulations to Amy and Ariel for accepting this statewide responsibility!

While attending the council meeting and listening to our leaders, I was reminded of a simple but effective leadership tool—“the Ask.” When speaking to a group, whether in a small team meeting or in a large audience format, it can be very useful to ask your team members to accomplish small, attainable goals. These “asks” allow the presenter’s message to be easily understood and focused upon. And because asks are distilled into a few key points, they leave the listener with the feeling that what is being asked for is achievable and can contribute to the team’s success.

Our esteemed chair, Conrad Davis, gave us several asks at council. One of them that I’d like to pass on to all chapter members is to get involved with financial literacy. Over the next several months, ask yourself what one thing you can do to be part of the financial literacy movement. Using prepared materials that CalCPA has available, these programs are much easier to deliver than you might think. Best of all, the impact of the financial literacy program is direct and immediate for those you interact with, not to mention personally rewarding and quite enjoyable.

If you would like to help with the financial literacy program, please contact Donna Bumgarner, our chapter committee chair. You also can find more information on CalCPA’s website, where you can volunteer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 3:23 pm and is filed under President's Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.