“Creative accounting” is really bad. Except when it’s good. Say that in a roomful of managers, and you get nervous laughter. For me, it evokes a wonderful old New Yorker cartoon by Robert Weber, where a small, meek accountant stands before the desk of an overfed chief executive exhorting the accountant to rescue the company: “It’s up to you now, Miller. The only thing that can save us is an accounting breakthrough.” Thinking more soberly about “creative accounting,” we conjure up scenes of Enron executives being led into court, humiliated heads of accounting firms trying to explain how they failed to notice that someone was cooking the books, or recurring headlines about the AIG debacle. Wall Street’s “financial innovations” of recent years seem to have given creativity a bad name.