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In 1532 Francisco Pizarro came before the court of the Inca, seemingly in peace, but
set on conquest. He noticed that certain members of the Incan court wore knotted ropes
around their waists. Assuming these ropes were rosaries, he ordered his men to ambush the
men who wore them. Kill the priests, he thought, and their
civilization will crumble. It worked, but not for the reason Pizarro had in
mind. The knotted ropes contained the
complete record of the empire's fortune. Pizarro had wiped out the Incan
accountants and with
them went their empire.
With the this event in mind, it's not too difficult to imagine how
creative accountants might wage and win a war. But that would mean leaving
war to the
accountants. Bean counters we call them. So low is the accountant's standing among
so-called creative people that creative accounting is considered a crime.
In their paper, "The
Ethics of Creative Accounting," authors Oriol
Amat, John Blake, and Jack Dowds define creative accounting as, "a
process whereby accountants use their knowledge of accounting rules to
manipulate the figures reported in the accounts of a business." A
strict application of this definition makes no moral judgment about
creativity in accounting. As in every other creative pursuit, crime and
creativity stand independent of each other.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi quotes the financial leader John Reed declaring,
"There's no such thing as reality. There are widely varying
descriptions of reality, and you've got to be alert to when they change
and what's really going on." Reed certainly doesn't sound like he's
spent his career counting beans.
It's clear that the age-old profession of
accounting owns its share of creative thinkers. It's also clear that no profession
or occupation should be excluded from creativity.
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