struggled with percentages.
When it came time to take the certified public accountant (CPA) exam, Beth was convinced that
she would fail. Beyond the fact that she had trouble with math, she was facing serious time
constraints. She was juggling a full-time job with taking care of three children at home—two of whom
were toddlers, both of whom came down with chicken pox within two weeks of the exam. The lowest
point came when she spent an entire weekend trying to understand pension accounting, and after three
days, felt like she understood less than when she started. When Beth sat down to take the CPA exam,
right off the bat, she had a panic attack when she looked at the multiple-choice questions. “I would
rather go through natural childbirth (again) than ever have to sit for that exam again,” Beth said. She
left dejected, certain that she had failed.
On a Monday morning in August 1992, Beth’s phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line
said that she had earned the gold medal on the CPA exam in North Carolina. She thought it was a
friend playing a joke on her, so she called the state board later that day to verify the news. It wasn’t a
joke: Beth had the single highest score in the entire state. Later, she was dumbfounded when she
received another award: the national Elijah Watt Sells Award for Distinctive Performance, granted to
the top ten CPA exam scores in the whole country, beating out 136,525 other candidates. Today, Beth
is a widely respected partner at the accounting firm Hughes, Pittman & Gupton, LLC. She has been
named an Impact 25 financial leader and one of the top twenty-five women in business in the
Research Triangle.
Beth Traynham and Reggie Love have led dramatically different lives. Aside from their
professional success and their North Carolina roots, there is one common thread that unites them. His
name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend.
Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a
unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of
songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and
white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine
numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few
professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to
cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools.
He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke,
and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes
and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his
students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent.
In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer
course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a
jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players
have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.”
Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay
dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the
fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.”
In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to
develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the
number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on
michael s
(Michael S)
#1