Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower

As a university professor and former auditor, I found Ms. Cooper's book to be an outstanding book which will be required reading in my course. The book focuses on the personal challenges that auditors face on the job - and on the challenges all of us face in our everyday lives. Finding a core set of principles to live by, and following those principles is not easy - especially when the people involved in wrong-doing are "friends" or business associates, while those affected by the wrong-doing are strangers. I was impressed with her descriptions of her life experiences - that life isn't fair - and that learning how to "get up off the mat" is more important than having the best plan. I was also impressed with her descriptions of the various ways in which she tried to understand what was being communicated to her. The "listening" and "communication" skills she discusses, and the inner strength she demonstrated when the easiest course would have been to ignore the anomolies or to take the explanations for them at face-value, are the real take-aways from the book. The accounting issues are pretty straight-forward - though, for non-accountants, she might have spent a little bit more time explaining "allowance" (for uncollectible accounts) and "prepaid capacity" accounts under accrual accounting. Further, she might have discussed briefly why the "matching" concept didn't apply to the lease expenses (the right to use the lines couldn't be stored and thus, the cost were period expenses, not capitalized assets). Nonethless, her book is a perfect fit with the Dot-Com Bubble HBS case - and serves as a great set-up for a discussion of the current sub-prime loan/credit-crunch that exists in the current economy. A life well-lived, and a book well-done.

As a baby boomer who lost some of my retirement savings because of the dirty bookkeeping at WorldCom, I was most interested in learning exactly how the good old boys had done it. When I heard that Ms. Cooper's book was coming out I was eager to read it but more than a little bit concerned about whether I'd be able to follow the details of corporate accounting. I needn't have worried. Cynthia Cooper (one of Time Magazine's Persons of the Year 2002) lays it all out and in a way that anyone can understand. In _Extraordinary Circumstances_ she tells how she and her team found the courage to risk their professional and private lives by doing what they knew was right. In this very personal account Ms. Cooper writes with clarity, candor and warmth, making this a book with great appeal for anyone--not just business majors and disgruntled former telecom stockholders. It's for anyone who believes that ethics must have a place in the marketplace and in every part of our lives.

Cynthia Cooper puts a personal touch to a great story. The circumstances that she and others at WorldCom must have faced are incredible. She forces us to think about our own decisions, and how the pressures we all face are great. This book, written in present tense, is a great read...that includes a personal touch that is often not found in a business book.

In case you don't remember her, Cooper was the whistleblower at WorldCom in 2002; she was a Vice President and head of the Internal Audit department there, and had come across some discrepancies in the numbers. Like any good auditor would, she and her team followed the thread as far as possible. And that was much farther than any of them expected, and through more roadblocks than usual. She's finally told the story of what happened: not just the fraud itself, but the story of both WorldCom and Cynthia Cooper, the story of an upstart telecom company from a state considered a backwater and a talented, driven young woman from that very same place. Cooper ranged farther and dug deeper to tell this story than I expected -- I knew it would be a personal and compelling story, but I wasn't as ready for it to be the definitive story of a company's rise and fall. I read nearly a hundred pages of this book on a Saturday afternoon standing up in a bowling alley during a kid's birthday party. (My younger son, age 7, was in attendance.) A book that can hold a reader's attention like that is something to be prized. This is an excellent business book: both a page-turner for readers, and a cautionary tale for corporate leaders.

The story is inspirational and should be on Oprah's list of must read books. This is not only an account of what can and does go wrong when "meeting Wall Streets expectations" are driven by the greed of a select few, but also of what is right in American business from the people who have moral values and do not bend those when faced with adversity. When all of their education, training and experience come together to tell the team of auditors something is wrong they properly pursued a course of action that was right and proper. "Making the numbers" as we are all told does not mean you make fradulent entries and violate the laws of any country. It is sad that people who knew better were deceived by a CFO who ruined their lives and those of many others fine people, while destroying a company. Great read for all.