Do you want me to invite your accountant to this meeting?

They will know your social graph and habitual patterns and, increasingly, like any good executive assistant, make helpful suggestions. ("Do you want me to invite your accountant to this meeting?

The lesson from such criticisms, I suppose, is that we should all turn ourselves into forensic accountants.

Coincidentally, as I read those words, I was sitting in a house in Shanghai with a copy of that very book which my landlord, a respectable accountant, had just lent me.

For example, if someone asks "What do you do?", you could say: "Well, I'm an accountant".