Because your father never had to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley. A great article in the new issue of Strategy + Business: “Not Your Father’s CFO.” The CFO is no longer a bean counter with a few ties to tax and treasury. CFOs, nowadays, are strategic activists with roles in strategy and operations, as well as bean countering.
It is interesting that the article notes “more than 10% of Fortune 500 CFOs have left their jobs during each of the past few years,” and the main culprit, they say, is Sarbanes-Oxley, and the stress and difficulties that lie therein. A valid point, but the real issue is that Sarb-Ox can turn a CFO into a criminal overnight, and into a target for Federal prosecutors as they troll Wall Street corporate executive offices for their next victim.
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I read The Vampire Economy by Guenter Reiman. It is a very important account from a variety of businessmen in NAZI Germany just prior to the outbreak of WWII. One of the most important employees in a business was something like the company attorney who could best guage how the NAZI bureaucrats might be currently interpreting the maze of government regulations. The copious regulations (bearing the fascade of utopian fixes for every human problem) in reality worked to ensure that everyone in the Reich could be found guilty of an economic crime, if the NAZI’s wanted to go after them. Our current business confusion over the SARBANES OAXLEY ACT is somewhat reminiscent of this.
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