We have an amazing selection of speakers at this year's conference, focussing on a number of topical issues relevant to today's accounting professionals.
At the peak of overachieving while on the path to burnout, Tracy claimed high-flying status on three airlines simultaneously and traveled 40 weeks per year, often visiting three cities within one week. She stayed at hotels for over one-third of the year and never put down her phone. Exhausted and conflicted, Tracy left her company to go on a self-declared “joy journey.” She tattooed “Joy” on her wrist as a compass and took eight months off to travel, recover, and reclaim her happiness.
Tracy’s “joy journey” sparked her desire to help others avoid the same disengaged, burnout path. Believing that most of us don’t have a deep or refined enough understanding of self to experience sustainable joy, Tracy wrote The Joychiever Journey: Alleviate Burnout and Design Your Life for More Joy to provide a comprehensive roadmap for discovery. With this bedrock of self-knowledge, even the busiest of individuals can make daily, intentional choices for joy.
As we emerge from the pandemic, wellness and self-care efforts have only provided short-term relief, and burnout rates continue to climb. The need for holistic self-clarity has never been greater as leaders and employees work collaboratively to create the “next normal” for work.
With three decades as a captivating public speaker and engaging trainer, Tracy works with businesses in two areas: 1) Helping high-achieving employees discover their true selves, empower their joy, and apply their ambition to attaining a sustainably blended, happy life, while pursuing personal success and business results; 2) Educating leaders to avoid common pitfalls of burnout, deploy best practices for retention and create a workplace where employees want to work, stay and prosper.
Michael Weidokal is an internationally-recognized economic and geopolitical forecaster who helps business leaders, policy makers and the wider public to understand the issues and trends that are impacting the world today, and will shape the world in the years to come. He is the president and founder of International Strategic Analysis (ISA), a leading provider of economic forecasting, international market intelligence and geopolitical analysis with clients all around the globe.
Michael’s ability to combine international economics, geopolitics and history allow him to have a unique perspective on the issues and events that are taking place throughout the world. His areas of expertise include the fields of international economic competitiveness, global market selection and geopolitical risk assessment. Furthermore, he has repeatedly proven to be able to accurately predict important trends and developments before they happen.
A prolific writer, Michael is a leading contributor to a wide range of ISA’s best-selling publications, including ISA’s monthly Country Reports, Risk Forecasts and many more. In addition, Michael’s new book “The Coming Decline” will be released in 2023 and details the growing challenge that the global economy will face in terms of generating growth in the 2020s and beyond, and what this means for the planet and its inhabitants. He is also a frequent speaker and appears often in the media, speaking on a wide variety of topics.
After a career that took him to more than 60 countries, Michael founded International Strategic Analysis in 2003. Today, ISA is one of the world’s most respected economic and geopolitical research firms, providing research and support for thousands of the world’s leading businesses, governments and universities.
Leah Donti is a CPA, MBA, corporate trainer and keynote speaker at conference and training workshops. She is the author of numerous full day CPE courses in the areas of: Auditing (Private company audit standards, PCAOB, CAS), Accounting (US GAAP, IFRS, ASPE), Fraud and Internal Controls, Financial Analysis, Business Valuation, Finance, Crypto (Digital Assets), Cannabis, Data Analytics and ESG.
Leah has a 32 year track record in public speaking where she has delivered over 4,075 public seminars, over 654 in-house seminars, spoken at 750 conferences, and received the AICPA Outstanding Discussion Leader Award for 11 years in a row for training excellence in the CPA profession.
As a skilled CPA with audit and financial reporting experience with public companies, Leah has helped the Top 50 CPA firms in the USA and Top 20 firms in Canada as well as CPA firms (in the DFK, Moore, BKR, Nexia, MSI Global, HLB and Prime Global association networks) train their staff on the current developments affecting the CPA profession.
In addition, Leah is also the author of several courses dealing with soft skills: MBA in a Day series, Critical Issues Series, Business Resiliency, Agile Finance, Digital Transformation, Ethics and Best Practices.
In her talks, speaker Lera Boroditsky leads audiences on a mind-expanding tour of human cognition, asking and answering the question of how we got so smart. “Language guides our reasoning,” says Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford, and is the Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. Her talks aim to encourage audiences to think about how this knowledge of language applies to their own lives; from work culture, to habits of creativity and innovation, to how we parse our daily interactions with friends and strangers alike. Language affects how we understand each other personally and collaboratively, like a bridge from one mind to another. Boroditsky teaches us to see that language, like intelligence, is a living thing “that we can hone and change to suit our needs” with a combination of dry wit and fun, memorable examples.
Boroditsky’s research, which combines aspects of linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology, has been covered in the popular press, and she is a sought-after keynote speaker at conferences, like TED, and at corporate and educational gatherings. She is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer. She obtained her PhD in cognitive psychology from Stanford University.
