Arthur E. Andersen

Andersen was an orphan who became a certified public accountant and an accounting professor at Northwestern before co-founding an audit firm in Chicago in 1913. His professional reputation for refusing to sign off flawed accounts, even for important clients, was the brand. The firm grew into one of the world's biggest, and then collapsed in 2002 over its auditing of Enron, a brutal lesson that a professional firm's only real asset is its integrity.