Cynthia Cooper
One of TIME Magazine's Persons of the Year, Best selling author, Internationally recognized speaker
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Jackson, Mississippi, United States
Cynthia Cooper
Biography
Cynthia Cooper is an internationally recognized speaker, best-selling author and consultant. Cynthia and her team unraveled the fraud at WorldCom, to date one of the largest corporate frauds in history. She was named one of Time Magazine's Persons of the Year. In addition to Cynthia, the designation has been given to seven women including Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Elizabeth II and Corazon Aquino. She was also featured as one of twenty-five influential working mothers in Working Mother magazine.
Cynthia has been featured in national periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CFO Magazine and Business Week. She has served on panels with notables such as Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, Donna Brazile, and Grover Norquist and has appeared on programs including Fox Business' America's Nightly Scoreboard, PBS's Tavis Smiley, NBC's The Today Show, ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CSPAN's BookTV, CNBC's The Big Idea with Donnie Deutsch, and CNBC's Squawk Box.
Cynthia's presentation style has been described as riveting and inspiring. She speaks for and consults with organizations around the world. Her clients have included large-cap public companies such as Dell, Bell South, France Telecom, PepsiCo, Raytheon, Walmart, and AT&T; associations such as the National Association of Corporate Directors, Network of Executive Women, and Washington D.C. Trial Lawyers Association; public sector entities such as the FBI, the U.S. Department of Interior, the U.S. Department of Labor; international organizations such as the United Nations; and public accounting firms such as Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Cynthia served as Vice President for MCI where she and her team helped the company move forward and successfully emerge from bankruptcy. Prior to joining MCI, she worked in Atlanta, Georgia for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte & Touche.
Cynthia is a recipient, along with Senator Sarbanes and Representative Oxley, of the Maria & Sidney E. Rolfe Award for contributions to educating the public about economics, business and finance. She was the first woman to be inducted into the AICPA Hall of Fame and to receive the American Accounting Association's Accounting Exemplar Award.
Cynthia previously served as a member of the Standing Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB). She was the 2011 Chairman of Board of Regents for the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and currently serves on the advisory boards for Louisiana State University and Mississippi State University.
Cynthia Cooper
Featured Keynote Programs
Extraordinary Circumstances
Unraveling the Largest Corporate Fraud in History
Using her personal experiences as a backdrop, Cynthia will share the compelling story about how she and her team unraveled the WorldCom fraud, the largest corporate fraud in history. Attendees will be able to experience events in real time through her riveting story which is told from a human perspective and looks far beyond the accounts and numbers involved in the fraud. Attendees will be transported into the meetings, buildings and settings in which the events unfolded.
Cynthia will take the audience through the magnificent rise and fall of WorldCom as insiders who witnessed it unfold. When she started with the company in her late twenties WorldCom had revenues of $1.5 billion. By 2000, revenues had grown to over $38 billion. WorldCom was once listed number one for the highest return to shareholders over a ten-year period and the fifth most widely held stock. WorldCom boasted the largest acquisition ever when it purchased MCI, a company three times larger; and its Chief Financial Officer, Scott Sullivan, was at one time the highest paid in the country.
Attendees will be introduced to the executives responsible for transforming WorldCom from a small insignificant long distance reseller into a telecom powerhouse. Cynthia will offer insight into why mid-level managers and senior executives chose to commit fraud, and audience members will feel the pressure that these executives felt to meet Wall Street earnings guidance and stand with them at the crossroads of their ethical dilemma.
Ethical Leadership
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Leading with Passion and Purpose
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Defining Moments
The Power of Choice
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