Word: cooperating
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like Rowley and Watkins of Enron, Cooper grew up in a household where money was tight. She remembers the lights going out when she was little; her father Gene Ferrell remembers her worrying over him when she noticed a hole in the bottom of his shoe he hadn't told anyone about. As soon as she could get a job, she did. Beginning at age 14, she worked at a series of local eateries, including McDonald's and Morrow's Nut House...
...biggest challenge was the Golden Corral, Cooper remembers. The veteran waitresses could carry an impressive total of five plates on their arms. Cooper could carry only a measly two. The manager was too nice to say anything but began gradually cutting her hours until she was almost de facto fired. So Cooper's dad bought her some weights, and she began training. Sure enough, she started to reclaim hours. "She'd rush home and put on that tacky uniform and go off to the little Golden Corral," says Cooper's mother in her most bemused Mississippi drawl. Today Cooper triumphantly...
...WorldCom, Cooper desperately needed to carry more plates. The culture was so anti-jargon that Ebbers had ordered her never to use the phrase "internal control"--shorthand for the fundamentals behind auditing--again. He said he didn't understand it, says a WorldCom employee. But that is like asking a weatherman not to use the word forecast. So Cooper huddled her small team together and planned their debut. She called Ebbers, Sullivan and a few others to a meeting in the main conference room. She was going to force them to see what an audit department could do for their...
...morning of the meeting, everyone gathered together--except Ebbers, the most important attendee. Cooper refused to start without him. After 30 painful minutes, he finally strode in, wearing his trademark sweat suit and holding a cigar, remembers an employee who was there. "What in the hell is the purpose of this meeting?" Ebbers demanded to know. Cooper, in her low, serious voice, asked him to have a seat and turned to her first slide, which defined the purpose. "He wanted to know where his next dollar was coming from," Cooper says. And she told him. Her division could find millions...
...powerhouse. In 1997 it shocked the industry with an unsolicited bid to take over MCI, a company more than three times its size. In 1998 CFO Magazine named Sullivan one of the country's best CFOs. At age 37 he was earning $19.3 million a year. The next year Cooper was promoted to vice president. The stock price had gone through the roof, and she and her friends at work would sometimes talk of retiring early, taking care of their parents and starting their own businesses. Cooper harbored a girlish dream of starting a bead shop. She had even ordered...