Companies — or even countries — that get themselves in trouble tend to have dicey numbers. If you don’t have the right data, you make the wrong decisions; and when you’ve taken the wrong decisions (out of poor judgment, bad luck, and especially incompetence), you’re often invented to try to make the figures look a little better to give you some breathing space. Unless they can break this vicious circle of poor figures and bad choices, organizations that have fallen on bad times can’t hope to mend themselves.