For today’s post I provide you a lark, a romp, a frolic in the park, a bit of tomfoolery, shenanigans galore, a bagatelle. I provide no profound thoughts; I provide no deep concepts. Rather, I provide for your consideration and enjoyment the opportunity to waste time, refrain from developing your audit skills, maybe lower your IQ just a little bit, and, contrary to the prejudices many people have about auditors, act just a little bit weird. I present the most useless post of all time. 

Back to the ever popular continuing series where we quote quotes quoted by actual quoters. Yes, people actually said these things during meetings I attended.

Fascinating thing happened to me today. Our company (as, I’m sure, many other companies have done) has blocked access to various internet sites. Some of this has to do with bandwidth issues so we are not allowed access to YouTube, radio stations, web cams, and similar sites. Some of this has to do with plain old time wasting so we are not allowed access to Facebook, Twitter, and similar social networking sites. There are also blocks on sites that no company wants to find their employees frequenting (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean.) I don’t know what the key words are or how the algorithms work that identify blocked sites, but I stumble across them every once in a while. (No, none from that last group – that I know of.) 

While researching 18th Century Internal Audit literature, I stumbled across one of my favorite poems, "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud".  How could I not share it with all of you? 

Been a while since I’ve posted. My apologies. However, as Paula Poundstone recently tweeted, “Last night I tearfully accepted ‘Best of Intentions’ at the Procrastinators Awards. I had a great idea for a speech.” So, because I have all these great ideas for posts that I just can’t seem to get written, I will instead share with you a piece I put together just over a year ago. At that time, the blog was planned but not started. In testing out some ideas, I came up with this one. Somehow, this seems the apropos time to share. 

Last post I provided a link to Peter Bregman’s blog about motivation and the role of reward and self-realization in each individual’s drive toward achievement. And I really thought that would be it. But then I got to digging around the TED site (for a quick update, you can check what I wrote about it here – it includes a link), and came across this presentation given by Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation. It’s just under 19 minutes long, but you’ll want to watch the whole thing because there is some great material here. (As with my last blog, I’d suggest you watch before reading on. We’ll wait for you.) 

This blog entry from Peter Bergen on the Harvard Business Review site contains a fascinating story that, at first, appears to be about good deeds. I suggest you read through the entry before we go on. 

For the last 50 years, the National Organization of Benevolent Internal Audit Scouts (NOBIAS) has been the preferred choice of every child wanting to learn about internal auditing. In our continuing effort to keep Audit Scouting as exciting and relevant as possible, we are proud to announce the following additions to our merit badge program.

Departing from some of the more frivolous things I usually talk about, I want to direct your attention to a new report issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF).  This document titled “Rethinking Risk Management in Financial Services” is a fascinating study undertaken to explore how risk management techniques used by other industries might have an application in financial services.