That was more than six years ago, and Paisley hasn't looked back. In fact, the 54-year-old always fancied himself a teacher. "My mother taught first grade and my father was a principal," he says, adding that he actually taught accounting at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California, while working at Hewlett-Packard early in his career.
Paisley knew even then that he would eventually go back to the classroom. The turning point came in 1999, when 3Com was approaching $6 billion in revenues and the board prepared to spin off its Palm unit, asking Paisley to be CFO of the new firm. "It was really tempting," he remembers. "But if I did it, I had to commit for a number of years and possibly never get back to teaching." Thus the fateful press release.
Now carrying a full-time teaching load, including the introductory accounting class, Paisley sprinkles his lectures and class discussions with his own experiences. There is plenty to tell from his 15 years of growing a high-flying technology company. And he keeps adding to his repertoire. Last year, as chairman of the audit committee at Brocade Communications, Paisley led the internal investigation into the backdating of stock options there. "It was an eye-opening experience," says Paisley, who attended 88 board meetings in one year at the company, where two former executives became the first indicted in the scandal.
Still, the most satisfaction he finds these days is in class. "Almost without fail, at the end of a quarter one or more students will shake my hand and say it was the best class he's ever taken." — Lori Calabro
Open a B&B
Travel to the Annabelle
Inn, in Aspen, Colorado, and
you'll find plenty of evidence
of owner Dennis Chookaszian.
Scattered throughout
the one-story bed-and breakfast
are the ski boots
and poles his family has used
over the past 50 years. Even
the name Annabelle has a
connection: it's his mother's.
What might not be so readily apparent is the sweat equity that Chookaszian put in to bring the stylish B&B into existence. Chookaszian, who was CFO of CNA Insurance for 15 years before moving to president and chairman, spent 4 years developing the hotel that opened in January 2005 and describes it as "a labor of love."
Not that it didn't have a difficult birth. "Construction was a nightmare," remembers the 63-year-old, who worked on the design with an architect and oversaw the entire process. The first contractor went bankrupt, the permitting process took two years, and building in the mountains offered endless obstacles. Chookaszian's finance skills were always in evidence, although he says there was "nothing sophisticated about it." But he did fall back on his engineering knowledge (he has degrees in chemical and biological engineering). Case in point: the former owner refused to allow inspectors, so Chookaszian had to determine himself that the original structure needed to be torn down.
The result is an inn with all the amenities Chookaszian likes to have in his own travels. Sitting on six public-company boards means that "I still travel 200,000 miles a year," he says. So it's not surprising that the inn features all the most up-to-date electronics, with a flat-screen TV in every room and wireless Internet access. And there is "air conditioning in each room, which is actually very important in Aspen," he adds.
Chookaszian admits that his ventures seem somewhat removed from his days in finance, but he says he now has something even better to crow about than a rising stock price: "TripAdvisor has rated us number one of all the B&Bs in Aspen." — L.C.
Grow a Nonprofit
There should be plenty of reasons
Lyn Jensen would want to leave finance altogether.
After all, the former CFO of Napster was
put through the wringer as the online-music
pioneer was bombarded by lawsuits and eventually
plunged into a near-fatal bankruptcy.
But she doesn't. Although Jensen admits that her time at Napster — where she was literally the last employee — was "a roller coaster," she insists that her new position, as CFO of Habitat for Humanity International, is not her way of turning her back on Corporate America. Instead, she says that accepting the position at the home-building organization was a matter of timing. "Some people get called to a mission at an earlier stage," she says. "But God wanted me here."
At Habitat, Jensen, age 61, is on a mission to bring corporate best practices to the nonprofit, which operates in 92 countries and took in about $357 million in revenues last year. "We're [upgrading] technology so we have end-to-end processing," she says, adding that "on the people side we are adding the right skills to run the group to scale."
The ability to scale is crucial at an organization that has doubled its revenues since 2004 and has had to respond to such monumental disasters as Hurricane Katrina and the December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Case in point: previously the organization manually processed its donor checks. But with 2 million of them pouring in annually, Jensen is currently automating the procedure. At every step, however, the challenge is to "build an infrastructure that will allow exponential growth" and to do it "within the framework of a ministry," says Jensen, who started as controller of HHI in June 2003.
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