Episode 121: Find An Activity That Brings You Joy To Bring Your Best Self To Work With Michael Horwitz (Copy)
Work is, well, work. It’s hard to feel so positive about waking up early in the morning to perform tasks and hand in deliverables. But being your best self at work actually has its personal benefits. So how can we find the joy or motivation to bring our best selves to work? In this episode, we are joined by Michael Horwitz, Executive Director of BDO Alliance, who shares his career journey, his father’s work ethic that contributed to his success, and how he and his wife have found activities to make their lives well-rounded and achieve success in every aspect. Tune in and learn how you, too, can find what activity can inspire you to be your best self to work and have a more well-rounded life!
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Find An Activity That Brings You Joy To Bring Your Best Self To Work With Michael Horwitz
Welcome to this episode, where I interview Michael Horwitz, who has many years of experience serving accounting firms as clients. He is a native of New York state and a resident of the Boston area for many years. Michael joined BDO in 2002 as a partner after having served as a tax partner with Ernst & Young. He helped develop an Alliance program at Ernst & Young in the late 1990s and then joined the BDO Alliance leadership team to service CPA firms on the East Coast and also recruit CPA firms looking to join the program.
He supported the program's efforts to evolve the benefits specifically related to tax, human resources, marketing, firm administration, managing partner and COO-CFO roundtables. He also worked with the tax specialty firms that joined BDO’s Business Resource Network. Michael assumed the role of Executive Director of the BDO Alliance USA in July 2015 and led a team of 27 professionals dedicated to providing national and global level resources in local communities.
In this interview, we discuss how his father's work ethic was a guiding light in the decisions he has made in his career. We also talk about his love of the Spanish language and how his wife and physical fitness have made life well-rounded and have helped him to achieve success in his role. There are so many great stories in this interview. I hope you enjoy this conversation that I had with Michael and are able to take some actionable items away. Please share this interview with anyone you think could help, as well as subscribe to this show and rate it.
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Welcome to this episode. I am very excited to have Michael Horwitz with me. Michael, before we get started, do you want to give a little background on yourself?
Sure, Amy. It's great to be with you and with everyone. In terms of my personal CV and history, I was born in Upstate New York in the part of the state where they've gotten a lot of snow. Fortunately, my parents were both teachers at the time, and it was the only place where they could get a job as young teachers. This was in a small town called Medina, New York.
We lived there for a few years. My dad realized that he couldn't support two kids on two teacher salaries at the time even, so he became a stockbroker. We moved to Albany, moved down to Miami, and settled in Westchester County, where I went to high school. I came to Tufts for college here in the greater Boston area. We live in Chestnut Hill, about 6 miles West of Downtown and undergrad and grad school there and have been working in the Boston area ever since.
Now, you are responsible for the BDO Alliance. Maybe you want to give a little background on that.
The Alliance is an association of independent accounting firms and non-accounting firms that like to hang around accounting firms. BDO itself is a large accounting firm, and the Alliance has about 248 US-based accounting tax and advisory firms. There are about 135 separate organizations. We call them business resource network members. This is our ecosystem, all under the umbrella of the BDO Alliance USA.
Let's go back to your story of both your parents being school teachers. What grades were they teaching? What was their specialty?
They were teaching high school, and they were both business teachers. At the time, you could take a class in typing. My mom was a typing teacher. I learned how to type probably before I learned how to write my name. My dad was in that same area as well. They're both business teachers in a high school environment.
Did you have brothers and sisters?
I have a younger brother two years younger than I am.
Did your mom stay teaching when your dad decided to become a stockbroker?
She did. She took some time off raising us, but she went back to teaching in high school in my high school years in Bedford, New York, at a place called Fox Lane High School, which was our rival school. I went to Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York. She did return to teaching.
With your dad's journey, I know it was probably better living, but was there an interest? Did he have some background as far as your family being a stockbroker?
Not that I know of. He was financially minded and was very good at what he did. Brokerage in the days of his career was very different than being a broker in the environment nowadays. He was very successful in doing it, and we benefited from the investment that he made in that profession.
How old were you when he decided to make that change?
I was in elementary school. We moved a couple of times. The last move that we made into Chappaqua was in the eighth grade. This is a relatively small town where most of the kids had grown up there. Every year you might have a couple of new kids showing up in this community. That helped me along the way in terms of being comfortable meeting people and ingratiating myself in new social cultures.
If you go back to that moment of being the new kid, what was your approach to making new friends? Can you remember?
It was mostly staying out of people's way. Be nice and treat people fairly. Fast forwarding to now, we have a whole bunch of fundamentals on our Alliance team, and one of them is assume positive intent. That's very important. It is part of your DNA to believe people are doing the right things for the right reasons until proven otherwise
It was mostly staying out of people's way. Be nice and treat people fairly. Fast forwarding to now, we have a whole bunch of fundamentals on our Alliance team, and one of them is assume positive intent. That's very important. It is part of your DNA to believe people are doing the right things for the right reasons until proven otherwise
Best Self: It is part of your DNA to believe people are doing the right things for the right reasons unless proven otherwise.
Did you have any issues with kids not being nice to you being an outsider?
Not really. Relatively speaking, it was pretty easy.
Watching your dad go back to school, being at that age, what were your impressions, or how did that change his focus? Starting up a new career and going to percent commissions is not easy.
It was a long time ago, so I have vague memories of his transformation. One of the things that I remember is at the time, he used to go to work with an attaché case, the leather case that you'd put your work stuff in. I remember being fascinated by this case. I also remember that he either got me one for myself so that I could lug this thing around. Imagine being in 3rd or 4th grade. I can still remember the smell of his aftershave. I wanted my own aftershave, and I wanted my own attaché case. I also remember wanting my own checkbook.
It is interesting, intending to or not, how we model ourselves. Did your brother feel the same way as you?
No, my brother's very different in background. He has different interests. He has been in technology all his life, which is not a place I’ve hung in, but I appreciate technology. He would go dumpster diving before it was cool to do and grab things and put together old stereos and TVs out of people’s garbage cans, things I would not be interested in or capable of doing.
Did you go to work with your dad at all? How did you learn what he was doing?
I never thought about it. I had the privilege or pleasure of doing that, but I just admired his work ethic and tried to model myself after that.
When you were younger, what were your hobbies?
I played baseball. I rode a bike. I was a nerdy kid. It's funny to reflect upon it. I always felt that doing well in school was important, and that was my driving factor. When you're living at home with your parents, you can take their guidance. You either go to college or on your own and make your own decisions. Even through college and grad school, that was my primary focus. In retrospect, I wish I had a little more fun than my focus on academic excellence, but that was who I was and who I am.
Do you think some of that was from learning about your father wanting a more secure career?
I think so. Ultimately, as a kid, you probably do want to please your parents and do those things that get positive reinforcement and then at some point, you realize what drives you as a person, and hopefully, you make the right decisions to satisfy yourself.
Best Self: As a kid, we often want to please our parents and then, at some point, we realize what drives us as a person. Hopefully, we can make the right decisions to satisfy ourselves.
At that time, when you were in high school or college, how did you end up going down the path that you did, and why did you find interest there?
I went to school thinking I was going to be a Philosophy major. I took a couple of philosophy courses and thought they were interesting, but I wasn't as excited about the experience as I had hoped. I found myself looking at a couple of different options and settling on International Relations. At Tufts, they introduced a major there that involved political science, history, economics and fluency in the language. Spanish was my language, and I loved all of those other three things.
I became an IR major at Tufts. I started a graduate school program during my senior year at Tufts at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, which is a very small graduate school of about 250 students that focuses mostly on Diplomacy Law and business, but all around international. That was my academic focus. I spent some time in Spain living abroad, loved speaking Spanish.
That interest led me to my first job out of college, which was lending money to multinational companies with a bank that's longer in existence, called Bank of Boston. It was a very old bank. They were ultimately acquired by Bank of America. They did a lot of business around the world, especially in Latin America. I got to do some traveling. I did that for five years.
What was it about Spanish? What was your fascination with it? What drew you to it?
I studied formally in Barcelona in college, but in high school, I lived in Spain for the summer with a family in a small rural town North of Madrid. I loved it. I loved speaking Spanish. I loved being a big brother to two little kids. I loved everything about it. I felt like maybe Spanish was in my DNA, and I appreciated the culture and the history. My favorite book I’ve ever read is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
What's that about?
That's about a dreamer. The Man of La Mancha, if you've heard of that play and musical, that's the story of Don Quixote. It's a very famous, big, thick book, which I was proud to slug through in Español during college. It's a story of a dreamer and his experiences.
Do you still speak Spanish?
I can, yes, and I do. One of our Alliance firms is in Puerto Rico. I’m fortunate enough to visit them on occasion. I get to pull out my Spanish. If I’m in Florida, we have a number of night-based Alliance members, so I love it.
When I moved to Florida, I tried to learn conversational Spanish. I had trouble because there were so many different dialects in Florida. I have been doing dance lessons in salsa.
Are you learning Spanish?
They're speaking English but playing Latin music with it, and I love the feeling of it. It reminds me of being in Florida too.
I lived in Florida for three years, and that was one of our stops. I lived in Miami in 5th, 6th and 7th grades and took a little Spanish then. My interest in speaking Spanish was ignited in my high school years.
You were in an international job dealing with Latin countries, which seemed right down your alley. Where did you go from there?
I realized pretty soon into this young lending career that it was maybe not my thing. It was repetitive. I looked at the role of a banker from an information perspective and was recognizing that even in the infancy of a lending career, there was a lot of information that was out there that wasn't accessible to me. This is in the mid-‘80s, and local area networks were not a thing yet. I put on a project to try to create a local area network within the Bank of Boston for lenders that would provide us with information that could be timely utilized to provide the credit-related services we were offering.
That was much more interesting for me than the actual lending part of the job. Five years into my time at the Bank of Boston, this was the height of the real estate market at the time. I thought, "I want to be a real estate investor." With my college roommate, I bought a three-family triple-decker in Chelsea, Massachusetts and learned the hard way that rental real estate is not necessarily the easiest thing to do, but it got me connected to a future employer that did real estate consulting as a business.
Best Self: I learned the hard way that rental real estate is not necessarily the easiest thing to do.
He happened to be a professor of a class that I took at Boston University night to figure out what this rental real estate business is. I went to work for him for about 3 to 4 years. One of the clients that we were serving was a national property tax firm, and I ended up joining that firm, which was acquired by Ernst & Young.
In 1995, I joined EY, essentially in their state and local tax group as a principal, and spent seven great years at EY. The last thing I was involved with at EY was starting a small Alliance program called the Ernst and Young CPA Connection Alliance. That no longer exists but is conceptually motivated to establish relationships between EY and smaller accounting firms. That's how I found my way into this crazy profession. That's been many years now. I’ve been at BDO for years, and I love it.
I want to go back to the book because now you got me thinking about that. Are there any lessons in that book that you find yourself going back to that lesson in your head or trying to remember as you've been going through your life experiences?
I synthesized a very robust classic story about a dreamer. Part of the book is trying to get into the mind of this particular individual. A lot of it is visualizing what he was going through in his crazy life in terms of how he viewed things. If I were to fast forward and what I can take away from that on a daily basis, I’m generally a pragmatic person. I’ve got a great team of 27 people with that we work collaboratively to run the Alliance program, and we've got some amazing clients.
It's the melding of the dreamer and the pragmatist and throws in a little bit of persistence. For me, that's the recipe for success. You need to think a little bit outside the box, but mostly my feet are grounded, whereas Don Quixote was probably a much more out-of-the-box thinker, and he didn't want his feet to touch the ground.
When you were reading about that character, were you thinking you want to have a little more of that or that you need someone in your orbit that's like that as well that can lift your feet off the ground here and there?
My wife is that person from me. You look for the things that are missing in your own life. She's much more of an aspirational dreamer, artist, and thoughtful woman. I recognize the deficiencies in my own personality when I was reading and loving this book and then tried to find it in my personal life through marriage.
I don't think it's a deficiency. Those things, whether personality tests or whatever were given throughout our career, tell us what gaps we have to fill. It doesn't mean we have to be something we aren't, but who is it in life that can round us out? Too many times, especially in business, but even in our personal lives, it happens too, where you're looking for someone like you and when having that different way of thinking pushes you.
It would be very boring to be married to yourself. Unfulfilling.
How did you meet your wife?
We met at a party in Boston. She was an anchor reporter at the local CBS station at the time and lived down the street. We were invited to a mutual party. I thought I recognized her from the neighborhood. In fact, I probably had seen her on TV, but she did live about a block and a half away from where I lived. We hit it off immediately, and the rest, as they say, is history.
When you're dealing with someone who's your opposite or fills those gaps, how do you work with that and not change that person and then not change you, but you expand direction?
You need to celebrate their strengths. There's a great book by Marcus Buckingham called Go Put Your Strengths to Work. It's all about understanding what those strengths are and celebrating them and not necessarily focusing on the areas in which you're deficient. That's probably going to get more value out of you than if you focus on the things that you think are missing in your life.
It’s complimenting each other, recognizing our differences, not always agreeing with each other in terms of how we would view the world, but appreciating their different perspectives. That goes to the heart of any good relationship, whether with colleagues at work or clients. They're all coming from different points of view. We have Alliance firms pretty much in all 50 states. As you would imagine, they bring lots of different perspectives to any kind of engagement with us on a professional basis. It's important to celebrate those differences.
How do you think as a leader through all these transitions you've brought into your leadership or the culture you create there?
I’m trying to be open. I try to create a diverse team as we've created a diverse Alliance program. We have looked to have lots of conversations with each other on a regular basis. One of maybe the few silver linings of COVID is the regularity with which we get together as a team. We live all over the country, but we've focused on ourselves a couple of times a week and making sure that we see each other. That's probably even more than we used to do pre-COVID. We're getting back to a normal travel schedule. Those connections are important.
Also, getting to know each other outside of what would be a professional relationship. We have something called Good News Friday. Each of our team members takes a crack at sharing mostly personal but sometimes related to work about what's good news in your life. We are helping each other celebrate that good news. That's important. We all are here for a number of reasons. Work-life is important, but work-life harmony is even more important. Let's try to have fun, enjoy what we're doing, not be so serious, and celebrate each other's unique characteristics that make 1 plus 1 equals 3.
We met in a number of ways, but where we've gotten to know each other is through yoga. You have that passion in that area. How did you start? When you were talking about your dad, you talked about following his example and then it takes you a while to find who you are individually. What was that path for you, or what was your moment of change or shift, not necessarily leaving behind who that was, but identifying what your unique qualities are?
Are you talking professionally? Maybe I thought where you were going was the reflection of self, physical, and comfort. I’m an adult tennis player. I didn't play it as a kid. I played lacrosse and did a whole bunch of different sports. I wanted to be flexible and healthy. I started working out with weights a number of years ago. I have a Peloton. We drive to Florida with our Peloton and our dog to a few places.
Health and wellness are important to me. Getting into yoga was a logical next step in terms of putting some mindfulness around focus and stretching. I’ve loved every time I would step into a yoga studio, and I’m very impressed by your ability to teach yoga, which is even many realms above my capability. I can't imagine if someone spent a little bit of time on a yoga mat with you that their life wouldn't be better.
How has that been as far as exposing that side of yourself to others as well that this has been an important piece of your journey and health, wellness, all of that?
I’m certainly supportive of anyone's personal athletic and health-related endeavors, whether taking a walk every day, which is important to participating in an active sport or being competitive in that sport, and I appreciate that. To be successful, you need to have that balance. It can be an artistic balance. It could be an athletic balance. It could be a spiritual balance, but there's got to be something more than just work to lead to personal fulfillment.
How do you think it's affected you at work or as a leader?
It's given me stability. I love what I do. I don't think of it as work. I will work in non-work typical times. If I have some time, I’ll oftentimes want to be working, but that's because I love what I do. I feel I’m very fortunate. I want to balance that with some physical activity that gets me out. I live in a beautiful part of Massachusetts, walking around the reservoir near where we live or up a hill doing some hiking. I do mostly indoor biking and Peloton, but I love to bike and pretty much anything that's outdoors and play a ton of tennis in the spring, summer and fall. Now I’m playing indoor tennis.
I don’t know if I told you when I saw you. I had to close my yoga studio, which was a hard thing to do, making a business decision like that. I decided I would teach, and then I got certified as a spinning instructor.
Congratulations.
They're like, "Do you want to go to this training?" I do my Peloton. I did SoulCycle for many years when I worked out in California. That's what got me going with it. I realized I could have a Peloton in my house.
Who's your favorite?
Kendall Toole. I love her. I like her spirit. I love Alex, Cody, and Emma. What about you?
Emma, Olivia, Tunde. You can't go wrong with any of these great instructors and do just cycling. Do you do any of their mat work? Do you do arms? Do they have yoga and meditation on their platform?
I haven't done their yoga and meditation, but what's been great is their app when you travel. A lot of hotels have the Peloton bike. You can do their short workouts in your hotel room when you don't have much time.
I bring my little weights to do that to make sure.
We're all in our rooms watching videos, but it makes a huge difference to have that access now when you're traveling. It's huge. What is it about tennis? How did you get started with that?
In high school, I started to play a little bit. We belong to the second-oldest tennis club in the country. It's a club called Longwood, and it's located in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The neat thing about Longwood is not only is its historic providence, but it has a whole bunch of grass tennis courts. It's beautiful. There are 40-some hot courts at this club. It's only open seasonally. It's all about tennis, and it's a three-minute walk from where I live. It's our second home. Our kids grew up playing tennis and going to camp there, so that's a big part of our lives.
All of this is important, understanding your hobbies and things that are of interest to you because as you understand, you bond with people because of that. There's one of the things you said that a lot of firm partners struggle with. They love the client work, and you're talking about how much you love your work.
When we're trying to create a message at the same time for all of your people, we expect you to have a life outside of work and not work all the time. When the leader loves what they do and works on off hours and works on the weekends or nights or whatever, it's very hard for people underneath them or their peers to realize you're not expecting the same thing from them. Is there anything that you do to make that communication clear as far as your leadership?
I’m deficient in this area. There's the capability of using technology if you're going to send an email over the weekend to have it held and not sent until Monday morning. I haven't figured that out. I should be more observant of those realities. People on our team know that I’m not expecting a response during off hours, but I could certainly do a better job clarifying and communicating that.
You're right. Our firm is very good at putting people first and having that culture of helping people thrive. There's an underlying expectation within our firm that we do believe that your personal life is very important and should take priority over what you're doing at work. As important as we think we are, the reality is not so much. Pretty much anything that we do could be done the next day and maybe even the next day after that. Don't take yourself too seriously.
It is an important thing to bring up. That's why I wanted to ask you about it because I go into so many accounting firms where they're not working necessarily. There is always a lot of work to do, but they like to work. It's very hard for staff to understand that unless, like you said, "I’m clearly communicating that I’m not expecting this from you. It's not going to change how I view your work ethic," or you set the boundaries on your emails and your communications. When we talk about it from a people-first perspective and say that in our culture, it's important we talk about these personal sides of us too.
One of the things that I’ve seen certainly within the accounting profession in the accounting firms that we collaborate with is, depending upon where you're in the country, you either went right back to your office shortly after the COVID shutdown or you haven't gone back yet. The physical being present is no longer a requirement or a connection to being successful. Everyone has acknowledged that. Although I’m sure there are some holdouts there that still feel like, "I need to see you working," to judge the fact that you're working or not.
This next generation of talent is not focused on time punching a clock. Most people who are smart enough to want to run profitable accounting firms will recognize that it is not a recipe for success, to demand being visible, working and not prioritizing your families, your friends, and your other extracurricular interests.
There is a time when you need to get work done, but we're not in a time-driven business. If we can leverage technology, leverage resources outside of our firm, and be smarter at what we do, then we'll get the work done, get it done profitably, and have the ability to thrive in our personal lives. That's what's going to keep people around. If that doesn't happen, there's too much demand and not enough supply of talent, your team members are going to find other great places to work, and shame on you.
We have to take our own responsibility for this. There are so many great lessons and stories. I like to end with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category. Family and friends, money, spiritual or health?
I got to go with family and friends.
Things or actions I don't have that I want with my family or friends.
More time for family. I’ve got two grown kids. I’m very fortunate they live in Boston, so not far from us. I can't have enough time with them. My parents live in Sarasota, and I’m going to see them for Thanksgiving, but I can't have enough time with them.
Things or actions I do have that I want to keep with my family and friends.
I'd focus this one on our kids. It's bout meaningful conversations about what's going on in the world and getting a perspective on their vision of where things are. They're in their twenties. Taking out my own personal experience and seeing the world through their eyes is fascinating.
Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want to have with my family and friends.
I don't want to have tension, stress and arguments. We have very few. I would speak to my wife and say, "I need to be a better listener and be more attentive." I’m at home right now. I work from home. I work in the office. I don’t know about you, but when I’m working from home, I feel like there's a dome of silence around me and that I’m work-focused and could be in my office in Downtown Boston. I just happen to be sitting in my kitchen. I’m not a good listener in terms of what's going on, even though I’m sitting in my kitchen.
You're physically there.
I'm physically there, but I'm not mentally there. Those are the challenges of this environment.
It's good to have an awareness of it.
Yes. I don't even know if I answered your question.
That's the thing. It's awareness. We do what we can do each day. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to make sure that people take away from your story and this interview from this show?
I wish I could turn the tables and learn more about your background and how you got into yoga. The intersection of yoga, your business and the profession is fascinating. You'll be teaching a yoga class at our Alliance conference, which I’m excited about. You do so for the SCTA. If I were to share my hopes, it’s that more people would get engaged with some physical activity that brings them joy. Try yoga and see if it's something that would be interesting to you.
For many of us, growing up, it was looked at as a hippie thing to do yoga. I didn't tell people for many years that I did yoga. That has totally changed in this world, and people totally understand the importance of this. Whether you move and do it, whether you meditate, whether you find chair yoga, whatever it is to reset your energy, when you find those little hacks or tools in your day so that you are more present, you wake up to see what's around you.
At one point a few years ago, mindfulness used to be a hot word. What do you see mindfulness meaning in the environment now?
That's a lot of what I try to help people with because the word gets overused. As you said, people will say, "Be mindful," and then, "What does that mean?" It is very easy to be able to be peaceful by yourself. The practice of mindfulness is being able to be present and peaceful around other people. It’s how we create the energy we want for ourselves, but also, we want people to walk away with an energy we're intending for them to take. Too many times, our day rushes at us, and we let the day take over rather than taking pauses through our day and being more intentional about the experiences we want to create with the people around us.
When we start practicing these things, it's like working out. It's like becoming a good tennis player or anything else. It's a practice. You got to train your brain and how you go about your day and break these little habits. My third book will be coming out on April 25th, right before the BDO conference. We're going to launch it there, and it will have a lot of my story in it.
Best Self: Too many times our day just rushes at us and we let the day take over rather than taking pauses and being more intentional of the experiences we want to create with the people around us. You need to train your brain and break those little habits.
I can't wait to read that, Amy. As we head into Thanksgiving, that's a time of the year when many people are mindful and grateful and profess this overtly. One of the ways to think about mindfulness is to imagine it's always the day before Thanksgiving.
It's that you pause and are grateful for what you have, not what you don't have like you were talking about earlier. Thank you so much, Michael, for being a part of the show and telling your story.
I appreciate the time with you and hope you have a great Thanksgiving.
You too.
Take care.
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Now for my Mindful Moments in my conversation with Michael, where we began with him talking about being born in New York and that his parents were both school teachers. He watched his father change careers and make a decision that both of their careers were not bringing in the type of income they wanted. He started over with a second career and became a financial advisor. That became such a guiding light for Michael, watching his father study, work hard and have that work ethic.
He remembered watching his dad with his attaché case where he put his work stuff in it and how that inspired him and wanting to be like that one day. He saw his dad as a role model. This is important. A lot of us don't show this side of us to our children. We don't often show the climb and show the hard work we're going through. Kids can feel their life is hard. They've got schoolwork. They don't see us as adults going through the same thing.
I run a lot of courses, also teacher training for yoga teachers. I always talk about sharing that with your children when you're studying for things, when you're working toward a goal and what you're studying practices are too. They can see what your work ethic is like and how you study when you're trying to reach something. It's inspiring for your children and gives them something to relate to as well, which I thought was such an important lesson to highlight in this conversation.
The other thing we talked about was his track to where he is now. He took a lot of different roads where he started out in Philosophy but ended up not being happy with that degree and moved into Political Science, Economics, and Spanish and got an International Affairs degree, which led to him working in International Law.
In that conversation, we talked about the time that he spent in Spain that led him to his first job, but more importantly, talking about his love for the Spanish culture and how that created joy for him. When we think about work-life balance, we think about exercise, but we don't necessarily think about things that create that bliss or joy inside of us where time disappears. For him being in the Spanish culture, listening to the Spanish language, the food, the people, all of that was something that created joy for him.
Getting back to that is so important. Identifying what those things are of having a love for language can be something that is your work-life balance. It doesn't necessarily have to be exercise. When we talked about the language, he talked about a book that he read in Spanish that was all about a dreamer, that was this character. This book led him to observe this character versus his traits.
This was a very important discussion when we talked about the fact that that character was very in the clouds. His feet weren't on the ground, whereas Michael led more of a life that was more grounded. When we identify these areas of gaps in our personalities and who we are, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with that. You can still have admiration for people that have skills that you don't have, but it doesn't mean you have to have it.
What we did talk about was that he loved this dreamer and how you fill your life with people who can fill those gaps for you. One of those people was his wife, whom we talked about. She is a very aspirational person, much more of a dreamer, an artist and a visionary. She's been able to help him when he's more serious about thinking about the future and push him in ways that he might not have been pushed. It's important to realize that not everybody has to be us and look the same and be the same, that we grow with people who are different and push us in different directions that maybe we wouldn't have gone.
We also talked about how important that is in the BDO Alliance and all the different firms he brings on, and the different viewpoints people have. That's what makes associations and alliances like this grow. It is so important to be able to share that diversity and those different viewpoints so that we all get better. The other thing we talked about was making sure that you get to know people personally and how as a leader, to incorporate that and understand the things that people enjoy doing and like to do.
One of the things that he talked about that he does with his team is a Good News Friday, where they go around, and everyone talks about something in their life that happened good. That's where we show gratitude. That's where we get to know people in different ways that we may not have if we didn't surface something like that.
He talked about how having fun and enjoying what you're doing is so important. Your work might be something that you enjoy, but also, finding things outside of work is important in order to make sure you release the stressors of work, even if you find it fun to be at work. To also expand your mind, expand your body and make sure that you're healthy. For him, that's been being a tennis player as an adult.
Also, the Peloton, we talked about that. I love Peloton as well. Also, the mindfulness where you can incorporate that into your life. That's a place where Michael and I met through me teaching yoga. He treasures that philosophy and how to bring that into the workplace in order to make sure that everybody is inclusive and compassionate with one another. You can give people the stability that they need not only in their work life but also in their personal lives as well.
In closing, we talked about how important it is with all these things as a leader to set the right boundaries, whether it be about communication, whether it be being allowed to take time off for the things that bring you bliss or your staff bliss and being transparent about it so that we don't all take ourselves so seriously every day that we find things outside of work that bring us joy.
I hope you enjoyed this interview and were able to take some actual things away for your life. Remember to share this show with anyone that you think would be helpful. We get so many great comments and so many people telling me things that have helped them and their lives. That's what drives us. That's what keeps us going, and we look forward to bringing you more great interviews like this.
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About Michael Horwitz
Michael has more than 20 years of experience serving accounting firms as clients. A native of New York state, and a resident of the Boston area for the past 35 years, Michael joined BDO in 2002 as a partner after having served as a tax partner (SALT) with Ernst & Young LLP. Michael helped develop an Alliance Program at EY in the late 1990s, and joined the BDO Alliance Leadership Team to service CPA firms on the east coast and recruit CPA firms looking to join the program. He supported the Alliance Program’s effort to evolve the benefits derived by Alliance members, specifically related to Tax, Human Resources, Marketing, Firm Administration, Managing Partner and COO/CFO roundtables. Michael also worked with Tax Specialty Firms that joined BDO’s Business Resource Network.
Michael assumed the role of Executive Director of the BDO Alliance USA in July 2015, and leads a team of 27 proactive professionals dedicated to providing national and global-level resources in local communities. Michael received his bachelor’s degree in international relations and master’s degree in international business and economics from Tufts University and the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.