Thought for the day

Citation

Evans, S. (2010), "Thought for the day", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 23 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/aaaj.2010.05923faa.001

Thought for the day

Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 23, Issue 6

If you have a desk calendar, it is likely that the bottom of each page features a little piece of philosophy. It will be something like: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” (Albert Einstein), or “No man was ever wise by chance” (Seneca). Whether profound or twee, motivational or humorous, such homilies suggest that a successful approach to life can be contained in the selection of just the right few words.

Printed desk calendars may be declining in favour of their online equivalents, given that daily sayings are able to be obtained through many internet based sources. These can be set up as home pages, the first thing one sees on connecting to the world wide web, perhaps to allow a brief reflective pause and calming influence before tackling the horrors of one’s e-mail in-tray. Maybe some people use daily sayings in the hope of gaining knowledge and insight with little effort, like a downloadable program, a little injection taken to immunise against underperformance or the anxiety arising from missed opportunities.

How different is such a daily saying from reading haiku and related forms of brief Japanese poetry? Such verse savours a focus on the instant, though it is usually through framing a brief moment in a natural setting rather than directly telling the reader how to think, or by purporting to deliver a recipe for a happy and successful life. Here is the celebrated poet Bashõ:,

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  travelling through the world –to and fro, to and froharrowing the same small field (Bashõ, 2002, p. 133).

So, if what you wanted was a moment of reflection, why would you want to have a 380-page book of daily meditations on business practice sitting on your bedside table or work desk? The one-kilogram brick that is The Business Devotional (Hayes Martin, 2009) is not just a series of daily sayings and certainly not daily haiku, but a collection of 365 quotes mainly from business leaders. Each is matched with a mini-essay that fills out the page. In each week they rotate through seven issues; motivation, team-building, career, sales, leadership, entrepreneurship, and managing people. For example, Week 11’s Friday (Leadership day) quote is, “I believe more in the scissors than the pencil” (Truman Capote in Hayes Martin, 2009, p. 81), complemented with a little dissertation on the virtues of good versus bad writing. Opening the book at random, I next found J.P. Morgan quoted as saying, “A man always has two good reasons for doing anything – a good reason and the real reason” (Hayes Martin, 2009, p. 239). Before long I was sucked in and started flicking through the book, recklessly out of order, too.

What would you look for in a Thought for the Day? Maybe it could be something like:

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  Don’t expect wisdom in a pill; who would ever swallow that?

Or something more like a haiku:

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  The book of wisdomWarding off winter’s chill windsIs my new door-stop.

Then again, maybe you would prefer to find a snappy quote from Bill Gates followed by a few hundred words ruminating on the state of conflict in your office or university department. Which would you prefer? Me? I will go with Bashõ.

In this issue we highlight the work of Maggie Butt and B.N. Oakman, both with their own elements of darkness and light. Butt’s poem contrasts sitting in a budgeting seminar with the fecund and sensual world outside, and one person’s engagement with the latter as a way of grieving. The Oakman poem reflects on the position of an economist teaching students in the era of the Vietnam War, taking as its starting point a disparaging quote about economics from former US president, Lyndon Johnson.

Please keep sending in your creative material, be it prose or poetry, satirical or earnest, or somewhere in between.

Acknowledgements

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and insights section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ.

Steve EvansLiterary Editor