Hooper

"As another cash management technique, Hooper would send a check in the wrong envelope or matched with the wrong invoice. So the irate creditor would get a payment, all right, but addressed to someone else—which Hooper would explain over the phone as an innocent mix- up. "Oh, dummy me. I botched another one," Hooper would exclaim. He would ask them to send back the wrong check and offer to send the correct one, a process that bought another two weeks."

"This kind of fancy financial footwork typically happened only near the end of a quarter, when Hooper and Lumry were struggling to ensure that cash flow would meet the targets set in loan agreements. (Hooper says the practice only lasted a year.) The company took great pride in never violating a loan covenant. McCaw aimed to set the highest ethi- cal standards, but there were times when it was necessary to push the envelope—so to speak."

"Drafts of McCaw lending agreements were written and rewritten, studied and lengthened, a tedious process usually done without McCaw's direct involvement. The agreements became very compli- cated—which is exactly how the McCaw teams wanted them. They wanted long, intricate, crushingly ornate loan documents. "The more complicated it was, the more I enjoyed it," says Hooper, who had to do the required reporting on the agreements. "I thrived on the chaos. We loved complexity, because in it we found flexibility.""