There is a report in the standard "Accounts & Contacts" folder that is called "Account Owners" that has the very unique ability to supersede the private data model and allow any user the ability to look up accounts based on the Account Name and Created Date. The purpose of this report is to allow users to see if an account already exists in the system (but is not visible to them because of the private data model) before they go out and create it again. A great practice is to put a custom link to this report right on your home tab or users can get to it from the links when they first click the Account tab (Classic). This is an immensely useful report except for one problem....the fields that are available in this report are very limited. You can basically only display the Account Name, Account Site, Created Date, Last Updated Date, Account Owner Name and Account Owner Role. The reasoning is that you may not want to share any other details like address, website, or other custom fields you might create like "Prospect" or "Protected Account". For some orgs, just the Account Name itself isn't enough information. For example, we have 2189 accounts that begin with the word "Baptist"!
Eleven years ago, Ezra Kenigsberg was helping me implement our instance at Delta Air Lines and we ran into the issue of not being able to add a couple of other fields that we really, really wanted to see in this report. He created this idea to address that limitation and yet I don't see that anything has changed at all. I can't imagine what could be so incredibly complex about giving us the ability to add even just a few more fields to this report, so instead of getting frustrated yet again when trying to solve a challenge at my current company with this report, I will just pour another drink!
