I have to admit, I was a halfway decent senior financial auditor with (what is now) PwC. I was no star. But my life as a recently qualified chartered accountant changed when I was given a couple of career choices.
The first was to follow my heart and relocate to the Paris office. I loved France (and French women, let alone the food), having spent multiple summers there with French families or working in a warehouse in the East of Paris.
The second was to follow my head.
I had been a guinea pig in an experiment involving flowcharting and evaluating the controls over a client’s computer systems. It was weird: I had done my best with the new purple Internal Control Questionnaires (ICQs), but both they and the flowcharts could hardly be seen under the barrage of critical review comments and corrections by the Computer Audit Group (CAG). When I met with the CAG Supervisor to hear in person what he had to say about my pitiful attempt, I have to admit being more than a little upset by his harsh words. He asked if I had listened to a word of the training – and I replied that I had not received any training at all! He went from my greatest critic to an admirer, saying that while I had messed everything up it was a great job for somebody with zero experience or training.
Shortly after that strange episode, I met…
