When we started drafting this column, the national media was filled with tributes to Steve Jobs, the acclaimed visionary founder and personification of Apple. Although it's always hard to separate hype from truth about a larger-than- life persona, Jobs is/was known for his ability to see things no one else could.

The "Big Brother" Super Bowl commercial announcing the Macintosh in January 1984 helped launch his reputation as perhaps the greatest technological and marketing innovator of our lifetime. His approach to life was also reflected in other advertisements with photos of iconic past figures who dared to "Think Different" about the status quo.

We want to explore what would be accomplished by applying his philosophy to financial reporting.

OTHER PEOPLE'S THINKING?

The memorial offered by Macworld included an excerpt from Jobs' 2005 commencement speech at Stanford that recounted how his life changed when he discovered he had cancer, and then changed again upon learning it was operable. He challenged the graduates to live as he had learned to live: one precious day at a time, aimed at creating a better world than the one they came into. Four sentences jumped off the page for us: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

Being who we are, we cannot resist applying these words to financial reporting because so many accountants' "hearts and intuition" are squelched by the multitude of timeworn dogmas on what is right and proper and what must never be done.

We challenge everyone reading our words, especially young accountants, to stop "living with the results of other people's thinking."

We also invite you to apply your above-average intelligence to "think different" about what you do and don't do, and to ponder what you ought to do, instead of what you have always done.

To help cast a vision for a new future, we discredit some long-standing dogmas that prevent today's accountants from delivering what our society, economy and capital markets need: useful information that reliably tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We focus on these three about market values:

1. Nobody knows how to produce reliable market values.

2. Asset impairments, but not increases, must be reported as soon as they happen.

3. Unrealized gains and losses are different from realized gains and losses.

MEASURING MARKET VALUES

The most frequent objection to value-based accounting is that nobody knows how to produce reliable market values. We assert those naysayers are either disingenuous hypocrites or oblivious to the clear contradiction in their claim. As proof, consider the following situations in which accountants already audit and report market values under GAAP.

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