Shivaram Rajgopal has taught accounting for 30 years. He walks CFOs through SVB, WorldCom, Enron and Theranos. They nod, and the lesson slides off. So he hands them a play four centuries old, about a man who talks himself into murder. That one sticks.
Rajgopal, a professor of accounting and auditing at Columbia Business School, wrote the piece for the Journal's C-Suite Strategies report. His point is that fraud rarely starts with a villain. It starts with a person who sees the line and steps over it anyway. Macbeth knows killing the king is wrong. He lists every reason against it before he does it. Executives know the accounting rules the same way.
The second step is the one that gets people. Lady Macbeth never argues that the murder is right. She questions his nerve instead. Rajgopal says a modern boss does the same thing. The line is "I need someone on this who can actually get it done," or a silence that implies a job is on the line. Being called wrong is survivable. Being called weak is an attack on who you are. When he asks CFOs and financial directors whether they've felt that kind of pressure, two-thirds say yes. Fewer than half say they pushed back. The third who say it never happened get a gentle reply. He tells them it almost surely did, and they just didn't see it at the time.
Stepped in so far
Step three is the quietest. Once Macbeth is in, going on feels easier than turning back. Fudge one quarter's numbers and the next quarter needs fudging too. Rajgopal asks his classes about their most aggressive compromise, and what happened the next time. A little over 4 in 10 refused the second time. About a quarter felt less resistance. Roughly 1 in 5 didn't notice it was the same kind of choice. One executive described a team with 14 straight quarters of meeting or beating its forecast. To keep the streak alive, it nudged revenue and expenses a little earlier or later.
His remedies are practical. Write down your doubts and put a date on the page, so you can't quietly revise them later. Give any decision that makes you hesitate a 24-hour delay and one conversation with someone who has no stake in it, a mentor, an old boss or a former auditor. And treat discomfort as a warning rather than a problem to manage. He calls it "very often the most accurate signal in the room." As more corporate decisions move to AI, he adds, "Ethical choices can't be delegated to a model."
Our read
Our read sits in Behavioral and Consumer Protection (M11). The slope Rajgopal describes runs through ordinary households too. The pressure that moves a finance chief is the same pressure that moves a retiree in a sales meeting. Nobody says the product is right for you. They say the smart people are already in, or they go quiet and let you feel foolish. The verdict is AVOID, for the trap rather than the professor. One small bend makes the next one easier, and backing out starts to feel pricier than going on.
Your own plan needs a version of his two rules, in writing. Take the biggest money decision in front of you right now, an annuity, a rollover, a loan to a relative. Write your doubts about it on one page and date it. Then give it 24 hours and one call to someone with nothing to gain. If the person selling it won't give you a day, that pressure is the warning Rajgopal describes. An umbrella is cheap on a dry day, and a second look at any pending decision is the dry-day version.