Reeling from the Sarbanes-Oxley blues, backdating scandals, and intense pressure to perform, CFOs (and their bosses) are vacating their offices at an alarming clip.

For years, companies have complained about the short-term focus of Wall Street. Now Wall Street has good reason to complain right back about them. Reeling from the Sarbanes-Oxley blues, backdating scandals, and intense pressure to perform, CFOs (and their bosses) are vacating their offices at an alarming clip. Various surveys estimate the average tenure of a CFO at anywhere from four and a half years to a mere 17 months.

This can’t be good. As Bob Brust, former CFO of Eastman Kodak, comments (see “The Tenure Track”), “If you stay with a company for only three years, you never get to see whether the decisions you made were good or bad; it usually takes five to seven years to really see the results.”

[1] CFO.com: The Three-year Itch?