Podcasts are a neat format that allows me, in most cases, to have a conversation, rather than give a lecture on the issues I write frequently about. I’ve shied away from producing my own because, well, life is just too short for one more thing. But I do very much enjoy being asked to join others.

This was a very nice endorsement for one I did a few weeks ago. Professor Brian Mittendorf is a friend and colleague and the guy who was instrumental in me starting to spend so much time at Ohio State. I am eternally grateful for his support and encouragement.

Brian Mittendorf @CountingCharity

.@retheauditors was, as always, brilliant & 🔥 in this episode. We’re lucky to have her in academia. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/oh-…

podcasts.apple.com‎Oh My Fraud: The Golden Age Of Fraud : An Interview with Francine McKenna on Apple Podcasts‎Show Oh My Fraud, Ep The Golden Age Of Fraud : An Interview with Francine McKenna - Apr 29, 2022

By the way, Brian has a great new article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about not-for-profit accounting, his area of virtuosity.

Is the ‘100 Percent Promise’ Right for Your Nonprofit?
While committing all new donations to programming may appeal to donors who want to make an impact, nonprofits should think about relevant costs and incremental spending before adopting this one-size-fits-all approach.

Per my suggestion, “Oh My Fraud” interviewed my Wharton colleague, Professor Dan Taylor. You are in for a treat in his episode! Caleb Newquist and Greg Kyte talk with Professor Taylor about how he chose fraud as a research focus, why the SEC is good at catching Dr. Evil, and why privatizing the enforcement of securities law could be the wave of the future.

Finally, just this week I spoke to Evan Epstein, the host of Boardroom Governance. We met many years ago in New York at a program on financial accounting for journalists sponsored by Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. He remembered me as that know-it-all who kept interrupting the esteemed Chicago Booth Professor of Accounting Roman Weil, now Emeritus.

Evan is now the the Executive Director of the Center for Business Law and an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. The Boardroom Governance Podcast and Newsletter can be found at these links.

Evan introduces my segment this way:

In this episode, I talk with Francine McKenna, a Lecturer at the Wharton Business School and a writer and commentator on the accounting, audit, and corporate governance issues affecting public and pre-IPO private companies.

We had a wide-ranging conversation, like two old friends, and I dropped some names! Click here to listen.

The last few minutes were a Proustian-style dig into my other interests and influences.

Here’s the longer version of the responses to those questions:

Rapid-Fire Questions (~10min)

a. What are 1-3 books that have greatly influenced your life?

Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, an unusual choice for Sister Henrietta, the nun who taught our Honors English courses at an all-girls Catholic high school on the south side of Chicago, to ask us to read. She encouraged us to read “world literature” before that was a thing, to explore all ways of thinking. There were no institutional or other constraints to requiring books like like the 18th century comedy of manners She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values, and spiritual growth. I have held onto his lesson that the people you surround yourself with should support your spiritual as well as intellectual growth and that the highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity. It was an extension of the Buddhist ideas in Siddhartha, in particular, teaching that attachment is the greatest source of pain and that uncertainty, discomfort, and change can be embraced as an opportunity to grow. I certainly have embraced change my whole life.

Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. I had the chance to read a lot of philosophy, political philosophy, and political economy while doing my master’s degree late in life at the University of Chicago. My master’s thesis draws from the template Arendt presented in her book on how the Jews were slowly stripped of all rights and legal protections by the Nazis until they were essentially stateless. I wrote about how this process had parallels in the way those detained at Guantanamo as a result of the Mariel boatlift and 9/11 were driven to statelessness, meaning no country then felt obligated to come to their defense to to take them back when US wanted to eventually send them somewhere, anywhere.

Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith. Bible for my professional education at KPMG/Bearing Point by Vince Neton.

b. Who were your mentors, and what did you learn from them?

Peggy Jackson-Turner and Judy Porte, CINB as an intern.
Vince Neton at KPMG/BearingPoint
All my editors as I have traveled the path to journalism, especially Janet Novack at Forbes.

c. Are there any quotes you think of often, or live your life by?

My friend Emanuel Derman taught me: A mentsh tracht und Gott lacht. A person plans and God laughs. Kind of my motto for living.

Dr. Martin Luther King: Morality can not be legislated but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart but they can restrain the heartless.

d. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

I collect heavy metal objects, Mexican masks but in metal, an old cast iron oven foot I use as a doorstop, French cast iron ornamental metal made into a coffee table with marble top that every mover has cursed me for and, recently, a cast iron boot lack in the shape of a beetle.

My favorite heavy brass object is… my name bar from CINB.

e. Which living person do you most admire?

Judge Jed Rakoff of SDNY. I love that he is a great jurist, goes up against anyone, including the SEC, and then writes amazing essays regularly in the New York Review of Books.

I admire virtuosity, especially in the creative realm, for example artists who operate in multiple mediums, performers who do it all such as writers/directors/actors in their own films. The EGOT crowd. Right now I am admiring Jordan Peele - Get Out, Us, and now Nope — from afar because I am a scaredy cat about watching horror films. But I read recently he will soon be one of the very few directors to have three $100 million domestic box office films where he has sole credit for writing and directing. That’s pretty amazing.

© Francine McKenna, The Digging Company LLC, 2022

The Dig

McKenna does podcasts