Find Your Way by Carly Fiorina

Author:Carly Fiorina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SELF-HELP / Personal Growth / Success, SELF-HELP / Motivational & Inspirational
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

2. Contrary to popular opinion, the ends never justify the means.

In the corporate world, an insane amount of pressure congregates around an exercise known as “hitting the quarterly numbers.” “The numbers” refers to a company’s revenues or profits or new customers over a three-month period, relative to the quarterly projections made by the leaders of the organization. The numbers are a big deal in every public company because they are a big deal to Wall Street, shareholders, and competitors.

As I’ve said on many occasions, hitting the numbers is the easiest thing in the world to do. A shift in the balance sheet here, some creative orchestration there, and voilà, the numbers get hit. The issue is always how the numbers get hit. One complicating factor is a little thing called ethics. As in, doing what’s right every time, whether anyone’s watching or not.

On one occasion when I was coming up the ranks in corporate life, I remember working late on New Year’s Eve, trying to finalize a big contract with a client. At the time, the organization’s fiscal year ran according to the calendar year, and I knew that if the next day dawned and I didn’t have this signed contract in hand, we would miss our numbers. By a lot. Still, there was only so much I could do, and in the end, it wasn’t enough.

On New Year’s morning, I made the call I did not want to make. My boss picked up the phone, I explained what had happened, and then my heart sank low in my chest as I listened to his response.

“Can’t you just predate the contract?” he said, less a question than a direct command.

I sat in stunned silence.

“Carly?” he said. “Did you hear me? This is an easy fix, you know . . .”

So much was riding on our quarterly numbers, not the least of which was the size of my boss’s bonus. I exhaled audibly, praying for courage I did not feel, and said, “That’s not something I’m willing to do.”

We missed the quarter, and my boss was enraged. Still, I slept well those nights.

Later, when I was CEO at HP and we were trudging through the economic recession of the early 2000s, I was approached by an executive with a “suggestion.” The outlook for that quarter-end wasn’t good, a fact I knew well.

“There’s the warehouse option,” the executive said, assuming I knew what he meant. He went on to explain that one of our warehouses held a significant amount of HP equipment on one side and equipment belonging to one of our customers on the other. As such, there were two balance sheets in play in that warehouse—the customer’s and ours. If we simply instructed the warehouse personnel to scoot some of our equipment to the other side of the room, in other words, we could hit our numbers with ease.

This was clearly not ethical. Perhaps no one on the outside would know, but we would know. I would know. We shut this down and made sure that everyone understood we would never, ever make the numbers this way.

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