(A true story)
A few years ago, a friend of mine was approached to take over the administration of a large arts organization in New York City. Ted was from the Midwest, but no rube. He had gotten his MBA and a lot of experience in working for non-profits in the Twin Cities, Chicago, and other urban venues.
When the recruiters were courting him to be the executive director of this New York group, he studied the financial statements and asked a lot of questions. The numbers looked okay. Attendance was stable, though not increasing, and costs were rising only slightly. True, the organization was running a deficit, but in the not-for-profit arts world that’s no big deal. In fact, you can’t believe the bottom line unless it’s enclosed in parentheses. Besides, the deficit wasn’t a very big one, and the board members had agreed to donate enough to eliminate it.
So Ted took the job and moved to New York.
Luckily, he was single at the time. For the first two weeks, he spent every day and most evenings talking with staff members as well as board members and top donors. He also went through the books and records. The results were not encouraging. Although the numbers checked out and the records seemed to be in order, the organization’s future looked grim in terms of performance bookings, staff morale, and board enthusiasm. If what everyone said were true, his predecessor’s years of service must have been spent entirely on making mistakes and alienating people.
During his third week, Ted began exploring the administrative area beyond his own office. It took three evenings to go through the file cabinets in the main office; by Wednesday at 8:30 he was able to put the last file folder back. That left only Harriet’s desk in her office to go through – a daunting task he had left for last. Harriet, the former assistant director, had resigned the day after Ted’s predecessor was fired. She had spent her last five years in the organization expanding the scope of her job to include paper-clip guardian, purchasing agent, office tyrant, and internal lecturer on matters of punctuality and control. Her desk was a massive hulk strategically placed to give her a clear view of everything and everyone in the main office. It had seven drawers, three on each side and one in the center.
The top two drawers of her desk were empty, but the bottom one was not. In it were three envelopes of used paperclips, a sheaf of blank deposit slips….and $27,000 of unpaid, unrecorded, un-known bills.
What do you do when you find something like this? Shut the drawer and pretend you hadn’t opened it? Throw the bills away and hope they don’t come back? Look for another job?
Too many corporate executives have made the wrong choice. Too many investors and retirees have seen their investments drop to a fraction of their worth because someone locked the bad news in a bottom drawer.
In the end, Ted did the right thing, just because he’s that kind of guy. He recorded the bills and eventually paid them, but to this day, I think he must flinch a bit when he has to open a closed desk drawer.