Believe in serendipity and happenstance, because you never know what might happen! That's because your greatest expertise may not be where you first planted your flag, but where curiosity led you to explore!
That's how ChatGPT summarized a profile article about me that just came out. And it's wonderful wisdom that very much seems to match my mindset!
The article, "The Accidental Oracle," appears in the spring issue of Pivot Magazine, which goes out to over 220,000 Canadian Chartered Professional Accountants. You can access the PDF here. A few comments: The Family Guide to the Internet is still available on YouTube, and yes, it's embarrassing. Unlike the article suggests, I did 'rock and roll and party all night' - while doing my stint as an auditor while on the road, I served as a DJ at the local pub. I don't know how I ever survived.
Enjoy! I did!
Pivot, Spring 2025
THE ACCIDENTAL ORACLE
Business leaders and politicians around the world look to Canadian Jim Carroll to help them make sense of what’s next. And his CPA training has been with him all the way. BY CHRIS POWELL
Somewhat unusually for an acclaimed futurist, Jim Carroll is looking back. It’s a chilly morning, just days into a year that’s already feeling like people who can predict what’s coming will be in demand.
Carroll is ensconced in his home office in Guelph, Ontario, reminiscing about a career that has seen him go from self-described “accounting dude” to a speaker sought after by some of the world’s leading corporations.
“I never expected that I’d be living this strange life,” says Carroll, whose dozens of books have collectively sold more than one million copies in Canada, who shares booking agencies with the likes of Barack Obama and Richard Branson, and who has presented to organizations as disparate as NASA, Disney, the World Bank, and the PGA. “I’m 65, and I can’t believe I’ve had such a weird career.”
Looking back, there were some early indications that Carroll’s future might turn out to be something rather more extraordinary than 30 years with a respected accounting firm and a gold watch upon retirement.
Like, what about the time in July 1976 when he was briefly a roadie for 1970s hard rock legends Kiss and April Wine in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Moncton, New Brunswick? “It was pretty wild,” he recalls. “I got to carry the red bell on-stage for [one of April Wine’s signature songs] ‘Oowatanite.’”
That was right after high school, just before he began his studies at Dalhousie University. He had yet to turn 16. Although someone thrust into university life as a young teen might have felt compelled to rock and roll all night and party every day, Carroll was different, quickly discovering an acumen for numbers.
“I didn’t have any grand plan to be an accountant, but the first year, I was getting straight As and I started hearing about accounting as a profession, I thought, Well, I’ll do that,” he says.
His stint as a “hard-core” accountant, spent in the nitty-gritty of auditing, finance and taxes with Halifax-based Thorne Riddell (later Thorne Ernst Whinney, then KMG Thorne Riddell, then Peat Marwick Thorne) was relatively short, from 1979 to about 1983, followed by roughly four years as a CA with Ernst & Whinney, a forerunner to Ernst & Young.
But then came the path he would never have predicted. Although today there are actual courses and schools dedicated to futurism, like the Futurist Institute, Carroll found his vocation quite by accident.
It began when he fell into the orbit of a Vancouver man named Frank Ogden, a renowned futurist who went by the name Dr. Tomorrow, and the two did some gigs together. Ogden’s career was winding down, and Carroll, who was already talking about future trends in the context of technology, saw an opportunity to pick up the mantle.
More than 36 years later, he has established himself as one of the world’s premier futurists, an in-demand speaker sought out by governments, trade organizations, and companies to provide insight into what lies ahead.
Things are a little quieter now, but at one time, there were book tours, best sellers, innumerable press interviews, and even autograph requests. There was a 1995 VHS tape called “The Family Guide to the Internet,” a hilariously cheesy guide to the nascent information superhighway, presented by IBM, in which Carroll, billing himself as a “global Internet consultant,” meets with the Newbie family to discuss things like how to connect and use newsgroups, and follow proper etiquette. It was, he says, 30 years later, “the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done.”
He was the go-to guy for insight and commentary about the Internet when it was still in its infancy, even listed in Sources—a reference guide that was a must-have for journalists back in the day. Each week, his then-publisher, Prentice Hall, would send him a stack of press clippings that were inches thick. “To me, it’s just crazy to think about how wild it was,” he says.
There was an event at what was then the SkyDome in Toronto for his first book, Canadian Internet Handbook, in March 1994, where people were throwing money at him to secure a copy. “I went home, and my wife was feeding our baby, and I literally put a couple of thousand dollars on the bed in front of her and said, ‘Holy sh--, look what’s going on here,’” he says.
“I NEVER EXPECTED I’D BE LIVING THIS STRANGE LIFE. I’VE HAD SUCH A WEIRD CAREER.”
He could see even then just how much of a cultural force the Internet would become, but what he never predicted, he admits, is how destructive it would be. He still remembers the less-than-favorable reactions from publishers and broadcasters when he told them that their businesses as they existed were destined to become obsolete.
During those peak years, he was speaking at anywhere from 80 to 100 engagements annually. Now that he’s no longer “young and stupid,” he’s scaled that back to 20 to 25.
Yet the gigs keep coming. Two weeks after our conversation, he was scheduled to speak in the United Arab Emirates at the invitation of the prime minister’s office. Then it was back home to Canada for a few days of skiing at Georgian Peaks Club in Ontario’s Georgian Bay region before another gig in Costa Rica. “That’s my January,” he says with a laugh.
His presentations last anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, with audiences of between 10 and 10,000. (“That’s when you’re backstage going, This is just weird,” he says). And while there are some common elements, like the humorous asides referencing the animated sitcom The Jetsons—which Smithsonian magazine once called “the single most important piece of 20th-century futurism”—each presentation is tailored to that day’s audience.
In Costa Rica, for example, he’ll be speaking to the National Association of Landscape Professionals about things like the use of “digital twin virtualization design technology” for landscape architecture and the acceleration of the science of horticulture.
Asked if his brief stint in the accounting trenches has been helpful in his current role, he answers: “Unequivocally yes. I understand strategy, I understand finance, I understand balance sheets [and] I understand business.”
Jim was named a Fellow Chartered Professional Accountant in 2000. It’s an honor given to those who have excelled in the profession — an honor that he still finds magical, given how far he has strayed from the profession of which he is still a member.