CPAs, I want to tell you about a subject I never planned to study.

Many years ago, I found myself deep in the literature on neuroscience, not as a researcher, not as a clinician, but as a CPA and financial advisor who had spent decades watching smart, capable business owners make decisions that seemed to work against their own best interests. I kept asking myself: why? Why does a founder who knows exactly what the numbers say still hesitate? Why does a business owner who articulates a clear vision keep circling back to the same limiting patterns?

CPAs, I want to tell you about a book that stopped me in my tracks.

I am preparing for my upcoming talk at AICPA Engage, the largest gathering of CPAs in the country, when a colleague sent me a link to a new book by B. Joseph Pine II. You may know Pine from his landmark 1999 work, The Experience Economy. That book changed how an entire generation of businesses understood value. Now, twenty seven years later, he's back with The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations, published by Harvard Business Review Press in February 2026.

I'm onboarding a new Fractional CFO into The CFO Collaborative, someone I'm genuinely excited about. Sharp, experienced, exactly the kind of professional we want serving clients under the MACKEY brand.

We have our first real client engagement coming up: a Grow Four Ways workshop. For those unfamiliar, it's a facilitated session where we harvest the growth ideas already living inside the client's team. Ideation, possibility, strategy, all coming from the people who know the business from the inside.

If you’ve been following along here, you know that RedSunflower Farm is both where I live and how I think. My husband Barry tends the vegetables and the fruit. I tend the flowers. And this spring, one corner of my garden is teaching me something I want to share with you.

Beep beep. If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons, you know the Road Runner never loses. She’s too fast, too clever, too innovative for Wile E. Coyote’s elaborate traps. She also never asks permission to run.