Bottom Line: Why Thorough Communication is Necessary Even When You Are at the Top of Your Game
March 4, 2008
Elizabeth Johns

This article originally appeared in AFP Exchange magazine. Earn CTP Recert Credits Now you can take the AFP Exchange CTP Quiz online! RECENT NEWS ARTICLES BY TOPIC Bank Relationship Management Corporate Finance Financial Accounting & Reporting Payment Resources for Treasury Risk Management Sarbanes-Oxley Treasury Management Career Services

From The Bottom Line Column in the March issue of Exchange magazine

"My divorce came to me as a complete surprise. That's what happens when you haven't been home in eighteen years." --Lee Trevino, U.S. golfer

The golfer Lee Trevino, famous in the 1970s and '80s, got into the profession through a circuitous route, but rose to be one of the best professionals of his day.

As the story goes, he overcame a number of setbacks including early poverty, but went into the Army where he perfected his game with senior officers. At one point in his golfing career, he was even struck by lightning, but recovered. Trevino went on to win the U.S. Open, Canadian Open and the Open Championship all in one year, the first player to do so before Tiger Woods in 2000.

Sound familiar? A talented, partially self-taught specialist gets into a promising career through a round-about way and through hard work and perseverance becomes successful? It is a profile that matches many AFP members.

But When Trevino was at the top of his game, his wife suddenly divorced him.

“My divorce came to me as a complete surprise,” he told the press. “That’s what happens when you haven’t been home in eighteen years.”

In some ways, the surprise element in this sports story has been playing itself out in the financial world of late. Last month Bristol-Myers Squibb, the global pharmaceutical company, announced that it had dismissed its corporate treasurer following substantial losses from investments backed by subprime mortgages. The company’s CFO was widely quoted in the financial press as saying that the securities in question were AAA-rated, following Bristol-Myers’ policy of investing only in AAA-securities. (Subsequently, the CFO has been quoted as saying that the company has since moved those investments into U.S. Treasury Bills.)

On the subject of communication, Bristol-Myers may have had the best internal reporting in the world, but some comments have surfaced that might suggest that deeper communication between the treasurer and the C-level left something to be desired.

The state of the company’s investments evidently was a complete surprise to the CEO, James Cornelius, according to some remarks he made to attendees of a Merrill Lynch conference early this year. He was quoted in an Internet transcript as saying, “Had I been smart enough to ask about that in detail in the fourth quarter, I’m not sure we would have avoided the loss completely, but maybe we would have minimized it.”

Moral of the story: In business, as in life, unwanted surprises are more likely when there is insufficient communication.

--Elizabeth Johns

Elizabeth Johns is AFP’s managing director of communications. Send comments to exchange@AFPonline.org.

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