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Back in the year 2000, as Arthur Andersen saw a stream of young accountants exit the firm to join dotcom start-ups, Kevin Rubin\u2019s workload continued to escalate as the public accounting firm felt the pinch of a constricting workforce.

Nevertheless, Rubin\u2019s career ambitions remained in lockstep with the public accounting house. In fact, even today he believes that he may have stuck with Andersen had the accounting house not collapsed in the aftermath of the Enron scandal.

Andersen\u2019s fate, the implosion of the dotcom bubble, and the September 11 terror attacks each in its own way contributed to the future trajectory of Rubin\u2019s career\u2014a convergence of events and circumstances that Rubin still finds difficult to untangle.

\u201cSomehow, the circumstances opened up an incredible opportunity for me,\u201d recalls Rubin, when we ask about MRV Communications, a client company of his that ultimately appointed him vice president of finance before 3 years later naming him CFO.

Meanwhile, months prior to Rubin\u2019s arrival at MRV, the company had announced that its CFO, Edmund Glazer, had been on the Boston-to\u2013Los Angeles flight that had crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11.

\u201cIt was more coincidental than anything else,\u201d remarks Rubin, who refers to the late Glazer as a friend and the CFO who succeeded Glazer as one of his great mentors.

Still, the repercussions of the early 2000s were not yet behind Rubin. Shortly after his arrival, MRV\u2019s market cap\u2014once more than $6 billion\u2014fell to roughly $60 million in a plunge that would together task Rubin and his new CFO mentor with finding a way forward.

Says Rubin: \u201cWe had to make some pretty dramatic changes pretty quickly to be able to re-orientate the business. In the end, we emerged as an operating company with three distinct business units.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney