From the course: Leadership Stories: 5-Minute Lessons in Leading People

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Great results vs. happy people

Great results vs. happy people

From the course: Leadership Stories: 5-Minute Lessons in Leading People

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Great results vs. happy people

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- Sara Mathew joined Dun & Bradstreet in August 2001 as chief financial officer. Less than a year later, she discovered the company had been accidentally overstating their revenues for years. Apparently, there are all kinds of arcane accounting rules about how you have to recognize complicated revenue sources, but D&B had apparently been using the wrong method for some time. So they had to completely restate their books for several prior years, and they had to get it done in six weeks before the next quarterly earnings release. Well, as you can imagine, that took an enormous amount of work for the finance and accounting department. Long days, sometimes working well into the night and through the weekends. But they eventually got it done, and on time. And the speed and accuracy of their work gave Wall Street analysts confidence that there wouldn't be any more skeletons that came out of their closet later. So there stock price didn't take the kind of hit that you might expect. Yeah, it…

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