Bear with me a minute on a personal reflection — I promise I’ll get to the financial foundation.

We were cleaning out old storage bins and came across a very old photo album in what was left of my mom’s last bit of memorabilia. A carefully curated album of old black-and-white photos.

What do you do with that?

We didn’t recognize most of the people. The contexts were long faded. It felt crass to toss what, to my mom, was likely a treasure of memories.

I thought about it.

In her time, the photos had meaning. They served their purpose. But now they were disconnected — like the last twinkling from a distant fading star in the cosmos.

That destiny is universal for most artifacts. Within a couple generations, our details are forgotten. That realization isn’t sad — just real.

So what actually endures?

My mom, like many mentors, didn’t just pass down objects. She passed down values. Ethics. Core traits. Work habits. A way of thinking. Those are the quiet building blocks that foster innovation and growth.

We build better, faster, and stronger than anything she — or your mentors — could have imagined precisely because of these intangibles that survive. Pictures aren’t necessary.

Think about what we take for granted today. Instant communication across continents. A village 100 years ago would have been amazed — probably baffled. They couldn’t imagine devices that connect billions, carry entire libraries, and track money flows in real time.

Even the QWERTY keyboard — designed for mechanical constraints long gone — stubbornly persisted far beyond its original need. Someday the keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen — all of it — will be relics too.

Again, what survives?

Values. Method. Structural thinking. Design principles. The foundation that allows innovation to build on itself.

The same principle applies to finance and accounting.

Take Excel — the ultimate 13-column green sheet. Why has it endured for decades?

Not because it’s elegant. Not because it’s modern.

Because it enforces discipline across and down. It forces relationships to reconcile. It exposes broken logic. A spreadsheet is meaningless if the formulas don’t hold. But when used with integrity, it encodes system thinking, flow control, and constraint management.

AI may eventually “replace Excel” in name.

But the structural foundations Excel represents — modeling, discipline, balancing constraints — will still determine whether an organization scales intelligently or collapses under complexity.

Old photographs fade. Ledgers get archived. Spreadsheets become unreadable. AI outputs will age out too.

But building well persists.

Here’s a modern example.

We automated financial consolidation using AI. At first, the outputs were plainly wrong. Totals didn’t balance. Intercompany eliminations were off. Revenue recognition didn’t match reality.

The AI had speed, scale, and predictive power — but it lacked context, structure, and constraints.

Impressive. Useless. That’s when the real work began — the kind worthy of marathon training.

It took mapping every flow, reviewing every ledger linkage, and modeling the structural relationships manually to teach the AI what “made sense.” Each correction required system thinking: why an account must net to zero, how intercompany balances align, which assumptions propagate across entities.

Once we encoded the rules of the system, the artifact became reliable. Monthly consolidations, reconciliations, and reporting ran automatically, accurately, and repeatably — until, of course, the business changed and required new adjustments.

Even AI atrophy is possible. Its outputs only last as long as the foundation persists.

That’s the real lesson for financial leaders.

Innovation is only as strong as the structure beneath it. Speed and scale are meaningless without disciplined modeling. Tools do not create integrity. People do — through assumptions that connect, constraints that reconcile, and systems that hold under pressure.

Finance, at its best, is the discipline of foundations.

• Every reconciliation demands structure.
• Every cash flow model demands logic.
• Every forecast demands coherent assumptions.
• Every control demands repeatability.

And yet we still live quarter to quarter. Why?

Because short-term wins are visible. Markets reward optics. Compensation structures often incentivize acceleration over durability.

But artifacts built for applause rarely endure.

For those not chasing fame or recognition — both of which fade — something more durable can be passed down:

• A work ethic.
• A focus on foundations.
• A discipline for system thinking.

The act of building deliberately, modeling rigorously, enforcing structure — these are invisible artifacts that survive far longer than names on office doors. They ripple forward, compounding across generations in ways quarterly bonuses never can.

So build. Model well. Encode integrity. Focus not on applause or immediate reward, but on structural contribution. Tools, spreadsheets, AI outputs — they will come and go.

The principles that make them work will outlive them all.

And maybe that’s the most fulfilling part.

It is deeply rewarding to watch the next generation carry forward those lessons and to continue to participate in the next chapter — not by repeating the past, but by surpassing it. Taking the same insistence on discipline and structure, and applying it with technologies that move at an accelerating pace.

That’s what I see in my own protégés — Meg and Sam.

The artifacts will fade. The names will fade. Even the tools will fade. Yet the foundation survives — and in the right hands, it compounds.

That is financial foundation. That is how impermanence becomes leverage. That is how we build the future.