Thursday already...

The to do list has grown exponentially so I must clear it today. First task will be checking the index - my co-author has already done so, so no excuse for delay.

The colleagues in France have sent me a set of slides summarising the progress of their group for my comments as a member of the scientific committee of their "chair" in corporate governance.  They have significant commercial funding and the work they do meets their sponsors' objectives by providing up-to-date information on areas of interest, such as board diversity, but they find it difficult to translate this work into academic papers. But they are doing some very interesting work on the relationship between board diversity and innovation which I think is very original and has great potential.

Very few people manage to meet the needs of both academic and practitioner audiences, an issue we are constantly grappling with at ICAEW. We had a meeting yesterday to discuss how a funding application which clearly addresses a topic of concern for members could also be developed into an academically rigorous study: the team applying are experts in practice and access would be no problem for them - often a challenge for academics - but their publication track record is very limited. I think we've come up with a way forward but it's tricky.

The research advisory board meeting was very interesting - we were invited to discuss the big unanswered - and unasked - questions in accounting, where research might be developed. My contribution - why is debit on the left? - was greeted with some amusement but I still think it's quite important as asking the question leads into questioning about the history of accounting practice. There is an extensive literature on this but I don't think this particular question has yet been addressed. The reflections of a Big Four partner about to retire on his years in practice confirmed my personal view that the role of a degree in accounting should be to provoke students into thinking about the big picture rather than focusing on technical aspects which they will study in detail in their professional training. Learning how to apply accounting standards won't provide a future generation of thinking accountants like David Tweedie, for example.

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