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CFOTL:\xa0What comes to mind when we ask for a finance strategic moment?

Friedman:\xa0MCI itself, during the \u201990s, was a great place. I was there for just a little bit more than nine years. The opportunity within that organization to have different roles and different responsibilities that were all progressive, or progressing, was really key for me. When I had my first real corporate finance job at MCI, I literally was a direct report to the CFO. While I wasn\u2019t going to show up on an org chart, it was kind of heavy for somebody who\u2019 was in his late 20s at the time\u2014to be able to have one-on-one conversations and have a real impact on decisions that were made and, toward the end of my tenure there, the direction that the company was taking.

I recall a time when I was working with the internal wireless strategy group. We went to Wall Street to talk to analysts about their views on the emerging wireless market. Keep in mind that this was 1997-ish, right? For CDMA, there were still five or six different providers. T-Mobile hadn\u2019t come around yet. Nextel was still a viable player. Everybody had their projections for the adoption of wireless communications in terms of revenue, and all looked like reasonable growth curves\u201425%, 30% a year for the next X number of years. And then we met one analyst who said, \u201cYou know, they\u2019re all wrong. This thing is going to explode. Every kid in the country is going to have one of these things. You\u2019re going to be talking to your grandmother while you\u2019re standing in line at Starbucks.\u201d This one person had a different insight and a different view that proved to be correct. For me, this was the moment when I gained the realization that conventional wisdom can be stood on its head\u2014that just because there\u2019s a herd mentality around what the right answer is, you don\u2019t necessarily have to go with it. That\u2019s something that has stuck with me every day.