Over the course of more than a decade, GE adroitly cultivated an image as a paragon of dependable growth, bringing in earnings figures year after year that are at least 10% higher than those of the year before, and virtually always in line with analysts’ estimates.  In an era where “making the quarterly numbers” had become the most watched measure of corporate performance, GE missed only once in ten years--and even then, by only a penny.

But in the ensuing atmosphere of growing skepticism about cosmetically enhanced corporate reporting, some people began to wonder just how this was possible.

In fairness, some of GE’s consistency could be explained by its extraordinary efforts to communicate early and often with analysts, thereby minimizing the chance of surprises.   Then again, what is all this attentiveness to communication but evidence of a very high degree of emphasis on managing perceptions?

As Fortune magazine pointed out, GE had long been known to take considerable care to avoid startling Wall Street with major ups or downs in its earnings.   If the company made a big gain from, say, the sale of a subsidiary, it made sure to post a counterbalancing discretionary investment or restructuring charge in the same period—which kept net earnings rising smoothly over the long term, rather than jumping up to 30% one quarter, then sinking to 3% the next.

Also according to Fortune, it had traditionally been a prized element of GE corporate culture for executives to come up with money on short notice from their own operations to help smooth out unanticipated losses in other divisions.  $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million might suddenly appear, even after the books had closed.  Just how this money was “produced” was left unsaid, but the implication that some sort of highly dextrous work with numbers was going on could hardly be avoided.

Even well before the Enron fiasco focused attention on corporate accounting issues, Fortune ran an article called “Accounting in Wonderland,” in which reporter Jeremy Kahn described a foray into GE’s complex bookkeeping system as follows:  “I was in a place where little was obvious, nothing was simple, and no one--not even the number crunchers at GE--seemed to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”