Sue Torgerson Has a Love for History

CCH’s Director of Segment Management is a true innovator who applies lessons from the past to today’s tax and accounting issues 
 
 
Sue Torgerson, director of segment management for CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business, spends much of her spare time immersed in reading and studying subjects ranging from art to history.  
 
“We tend to think that everything is new and the world around us is changing in new ways, but when you look back over history, you realize that everything old is new again,” Torgerson says. 
 
A perfect example surfaced during a recent trip to her home state, Michigan. “Bank solvency is in the news now, but it’s been going on since the frontier days,” she says. She explains that bankers would find out when examiners were coming to town and ship gold into the bank in the nick of time so that it would appear solvent. When the inspector left, the gold was out the back door and en route to the next bank, shipped downriver by canoe. “It was a shell game,” Torgerson says. 
 
Two other issues that interest Torgerson are globalization and immigration. A voracious researcher, she’s traced one family’s immigration from Scotland to the United States in the 1700s up through the Civil War. “We talk about globalization and immigration as if these are new things, but both have been going on since the beginning of time,” she says.
 
An uncanny ability to see links, patterns and context comes in handy when you are charged with helping corporate and CPA customers do their jobs more effectively. “When you study innovation, you find that most of it really comes from re-engineering existing solutions to human problems that have been around for a long time,” Torgerson says.
 
Torgerson was part of the contextual design team that developed the new CCH KnowledgeConnect product. By focusing on how individuals acquire knowledge, the team found a solution that helps firms capture and share knowledge as a natural part of daily activities and workflow. That helps firms leverage their intellectual property, and makes knowledge more accessible to everyone in the firm, she says. 
 
During the process, Torgerson says she had a real epiphany around CCH’s contextual design effort. 
 
“Accounting is a very human profession, but it’s not something people talk about much. Technical skills matter, of course, but it is the ‘soft skills’ that are really the core of future success. Firms will need people with creative, problem-solving skills — and technology that doesn’t hold them back.”