Oops!

A guest column today (and a week before you read it in the Business Journal):

USA Today ran a cartoon in Friday's paper that originally appeared in The Detroit News upon the Supreme Court ruling that Arthur Andersen was not guilty of obstruction of justice in the Enron debacle. It shows a robed justice standing beside the tombstone of Arthur Andersen Inc, and he says simply, “Oops, sorry.”

It was a striking conclusion to the journey of 85,000 people who were part of a global family that was once the world's premiere public accounting firm. For many of them, I suspect for many it was a little like the convicted felon who is released from jail after DNA confirms their mistaken identity. Until the Supreme Court ruling, many former Andersen partners and associates have lived in a professional purgatory, learning to explain their resumes with a dimunitive spirit that is a mix of what was once unabashed pride peppered with the shame of a schoolchild made to stay after school for a transgression he didn't commit.

As the Andersen worldwide story goes, Kansas City sat on an island all its own. As the firm slowly broke apart both in the U.S. and in key worldwide offices, National Public Radio sent a reporter to Kansas City to interview Managing Partner Jeff Dobbs, other partners and clients. How was it that, unlike any other city anywhere in the world, Andersen Kansas City was able to retain all of its clients, and even more remarkably, all of its people?
Young managers were routinely queried by their parents as to why they weren't job searching. Partners were actively pursued by other firms promising them the moon. Clients were getting a full court press from other Big Five accounting firms. Why did Andersen Kansas City remain almost entirely intact when it made its eventual move en masse to KPMG? Why did then Chamber of Commerce chair Jeffrey Comment elicit a standing ovation for Andersen's handling of the situation? Why did story after story quote Kansas City CEOs who remained supportive of their Andersen team til the bitter end, eventually moving their business to KPMG to remain loyal to their now former Andersen team?

The answer is, as most thing are at their core, simple. The Andersen team behaved as all good enterprises do: establish strong, committed and whatever-it-takes relationships when times are good and they will bear you in good stead when you suddenly need them in ways you never fathomed. The Kansas City business and civic community didn't rally behind the local Andersen office because anyone asked them to. They stepped up because for years before, Andersen had stepped up for its clients and for its community. Community and clients alike seemed to respond to the Andersen travails with one single, silent battle cry: “it's payback time.” In the end, a group of the city's highest profile CEOs got together over a lunch to toast the Andersen leadership, and to bid them a fond Kansas City farewell. No shame. No dishonor. Just support and gratitude for a service ethic and professional integrity built with the right stuff.

Though the names, faces and circumstances are all different, many other KC businesses have had similar brushes with fate that had or have the potential to conclude as Andersen did. So, what is the lesson for those businesses who hopefully never have to travel that fateful road?

It is the lesson of deep humility best embodied in that sage quote: “Be kind to those on your way up, because you never know who you'll meet on the way down.”

The people of Arthur Andersen Kansas City were kind and thoughtful and client-focused and civic-minded on their way up to the top of Kansas City's accounting world. The trip down was a wild spiral that ended in a hard, fatal crash. But on that downward journey, they learned the one simple truth that is the essence of the Kansas City spirit. They learned that what matters most is not always the destination, but the relationships you build along the journey.

The day the Supreme Court rendered its opinion, I, for one, silently raised my glass in a toast to the people of an enterprise gone by. I remember watching what seemed like a death march as Andersen associates went to turn in their key, their IDs, their laptops in those final days. I wondered how each of them would sleep in the days and weeks that followed.

They knew then what we all should now have learned through too many sagas stories of corporate greed and misdeed: that years hence, when you put your head on the pillow, the most important thing you ever take home is a sense that you conducted yourself with integrity, with unyielding commitment and with a feeling deep in your gut that you gave it your all.

Sleep well, Arthur Andersen. At last, you've earned a good night's rest.

--Roshann Parris is President and CEO of Parris Communications, a public relations and strategic communications firm that represented Arthur Andersen for nine years.