Several years ago, I worked at Amway’s headquarters.  The company decided to invest heavily in training the entire company on project management, goal setting and execution.

At the end of the training, each department in the company began working on a goal.

Marketing had a goal. Financing had a goal. R&D Had a goal. Sales had a goal.

I worked in the sales department for my region.

Every few weeks, at an employee meeting, a different department would present on how they were coming along with their goal.

The sales department was not actively working on the goal.

One day, my boss sent a supervisor over to my desk to talk to me.

She came over to let me know that the employee meeting was coming up and he needed me to speak at the employee meeting on the goal. Specifically, he needed me to provide false information, false numbers and pretty much false everything since we had not been working on the goal.

I was not interested in this fraudulent presentation.

So, on the day of the presentation, I stayed home, and the day after.

The supervisor did the fake presentation instead of me.

This decision led to me being treated like a crazy person by HR and like a pariah by my teammates.

On one occasion, someone in another department told me that my boss was a pathological liar and everyone knew it. This had been going on for decades because he had held a leadership role at the company for some time.

However, that information was just whispered quietly to me in a company of over dozens of employees who kept quiet and went about their work.

I endured two more years of emotional abuse from him, gas lighting and what felt like a daily beat-down at work before resigning to go and recuperate.

A few years ago, I decided to check up on the supervisor who had asked me, on behalf of my boss, to fudge the numbers.

Her LinkedIn profile had a job that she had never held at the company on it.

So, I would say that this person wasn’t just being bullied by my boss to go tell me to lie. She wasn’t the most honest person either.

As for my former boss, he recently finally did the right thing. He died.

The problem with this situation is that I worked in a sea of hundreds of honest people.  The problem was one shady individual who wielded a great deal of power inside an office filled with honest people. Honest cowards, yes, but for the most part honest people.

Right now, you may be thinking, “Was it really a sea of honest people? What about the pyramid scheme, the false promises and the tools and tapes business under the business?”

That’s a conversation perhaps for another time, and a future post.

My experience was working in an office with honest people, people with MBAs and other advanced degrees coming to work every day and doing their very best.

Nestled in with all these people was one pathological liar, who made going to work a living hell.

Fortunately for me, his actions affected only one branch office inside a large 20,000+ global corporation.

However, minimizing the actions of one individual that only affected a branch office is dangerous.

Did Enron commit fraud or did Kenneth Lay commit fraud?

Did Enron Commit fraud or did Jeffrey Skilling commit fraud?

One person is enough. Also, LLCs don’t do bad things. Humans do.

Now, I’m going to throw it back to you.

Have you ever been asked to fudge numbers at work?
What did you do?

Are you being asked to fudge numbers at work right now?

Are you fudging numbers at work right now?

Share as much as you feel comfortable sharing that is factual, including where you work if the information will warn or protect others (like Investors). I am looking forward to hearing how others handled this.

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