Here a Chief, There a Chief:

achievements in managing Enron’s finances (Altman 2002). Three years later, the sponsor of the Excellence Awards, Andersen Accounting, was defunct and out of business, while Fastow was seen taking perp walks on television and has since been sentenced to serve 10 years behind bars. And Fastow was not alone, for his former counterparts at WorldCom and Tyco, Scott D. Sullivan and Mark H. Swartz, and numerous other top finance managers also paraded the courthouse steps. Because of their involvement in fraudulently looting company resources, CFOs across the country suddenly have fallen from being poster boys of their firms ’ orienta-tion toward shareholder-value to public ouster. Four decades earlier, such a scene would have been virtually unthinkable. At that time, cor-porate finance had been a back-office function performed by treasurers or controllers, whose duties were confined to tasks like bookkeeping and preparing tax statements. What is behind this dramatic transformation of finance managers from bean counters to spin doctors? Common wisdom has it that CFOs became popular in tandem with firms ’ increased attention to the whims of financial markets and that promoting the finance manager from the tail end of corporate decision making to its strate-gic apex was part and parcel of the shareholder