Just the investigation itself have ruined many companies.
The one that I saw fairly closely was McAfee where they did two really screwy things. The first was that they overdid it with acquisitions then fiddled with the numbers to make them look better for having done them. Then, the idiots on the compensation committee gave themselves predated options. The latter one led to something like 3 or 4 of the top 5 people doing jail time.
Having that happen to your management is bad enough, but what really hurt was that the board curled into a defensive fetal position where the only topic was investigations and compliance and entire board meetings would go by without talking about the business.
The case of IBM has some similarities. There it was antitrust, but again, during that time, every business decision was about what some agency of the government would think rather than what is good for our business (you don't need to break the law to develop your business, but you do need to think about business development).
Apple and Microsoft watched IBM writhe itself down this way and they have always just taken the attitude that they would keep doing what they thought was best until the government came in and shut down the lights.
If you don't have people at the top who are going to think that way, they'll shut down the lights themselves.
The one that I saw fairly closely was McAfee where they did two really screwy things. The first was that they overdid it with acquisitions then fiddled with the numbers to make them look better for having done them. Then, the idiots on the compensation committee gave themselves predated options. The latter one led to something like 3 or 4 of the top 5 people doing jail time.
Having that happen to your management is bad enough, but what really hurt was that the board curled into a defensive fetal position where the only topic was investigations and compliance and entire board meetings would go by without talking about the business.
The case of IBM has some similarities. There it was antitrust, but again, during that time, every business decision was about what some agency of the government would think rather than what is good for our business (you don't need to break the law to develop your business, but you do need to think about business development).
Apple and Microsoft watched IBM writhe itself down this way and they have always just taken the attitude that they would keep doing what they thought was best until the government came in and shut down the lights.
If you don't have people at the top who are going to think that way, they'll shut down the lights themselves.