TEI 2008: teamwork, excellence, and integrity.

• Author: McDonough, Robert J.
• Position: Tax Executives Institute

I'm a Red Sox fan. To different people that means different things. To many, if not most, people in Red Sox Nation, it means that most nights we have two teams to root for--Boston and whoever's playing the [fill in the blank]. To others, it means having lots of experience with frustration and with waiting. I am not a person who views sports as the perfect metaphor for life, but to me, a key aspect of being a Red Sox fan, or really any type of sports fan, is the balance you have to strike between hope and reality.

Year after year, you have to assess the talent and other resources you have, weigh them against the challenges you face, and then--despite the odds--go out each day and do the best you can with what you have. This is the same balance, of course, that you have to bring to your profession, whether you are an athlete competing at the top of your game or a tax executive coping with ever-changing rules of the game. And, to be successful, you cannot do it alone; you have to build a team, assign everyone to tasks well suited to their talents, and then count on their commitment to excellence and their basic integrity to get the job done.

Manager of the Year

For the past several years, I have had the privilege to be part of the remarkable team of tax professionals who compose Tax Executives Institute. And for the last year, I have had the good fortune to work with an Institute president who could give baseball's best general manager a run for his money. Dave Bernard of the Northeast Wisconsin Chapter has been an absolutely superb president. He assembled a great group of volunteer leaders, formulated clear, achievable objectives under the rubric "TEI 2007: Building on Six Decades of Success," and then rolled up his sleeves and helped the team not only meet, but exceed the objectives. TEI's 2007 Annual Report, which will be published later this year, will document TEI's accomplishments, but here are a few highlights:

Membership: TEI continued to grow, adding more than a thousand new members and crossing the 7,000-member threshold for the first time. Education: We provided high quality education to in-house tax professionals, with registrations for our programs exceeding 3,600. Of particular note are the nearly 900 people who attended TEI's two financial reporting seminars, the second one added when the first sold out before the brochure was mailed. The Institute also co-sponsored the National Conference on the Tax Gap. Advocacy: Not only did...