Imagine moving to a foreign country where the people speak a different language from your own. While you may be able to get by for a while without learning the language of this country, you will be severely hampered. Asking for and receiving simple information will be a tedious and frustrating task. For example, assume you want to go to a movie. How do you get to the movie theater? How do you order a medium box of popcorn? What are the actors in the movie saying? More complex tasks are even a bigger challenge. Imagine trying to rent an apartment. What does the landlord expect from you as a tenant? The contract she is requiring you to sign is completely unintelligible to you. Even an interpreter will only help so much. Your interpreter can translate, but the process is slow. And it would be impossible to rely on your interpreter all of the time.
Accounting is called the “language of business.” Much of what is communicated about a business is done in this financial language. And yet to many entrepreneurs this is a language as foreign to them as the language was to the traveler in this story.
This summer I am learning this “cultural experience” from the opposite perspective. I am teaching our required graduate Entrepreneurship course. But instead of teaching it to our MBA students, I am teaching to a section that has only graduate students in our Master of Accountancy program. As I teach them about entrepreneurship, I now appreciate that many of them experience my world of entrepreneurship as a strange and confusing place.
Their world is order and precision. Mine is change and chaos. Their world is historic measurement of what has happened. Mine is the hope and dreams of what might be. Neither is better or worse, and neither is right or wrong. And in today’s entrepreneurial economy we need each other more than ever.
We teachers always like to say that we learn as much from our classes as do our students. This summer I know I am learning much more than my students. Given the importance of entrepreneurs really knowing and understanding their numbers, I know that what I learn from my accounting students will help me to better prepare my entrepreneurship students for the for their frequent and critical trips into the Land of Accounting.