Enron Chapter Summary

Greg Whalley, (former Enron President and Chief Operation Officer) had six to eight conversations last fall with the Treasury’s Department Peter Fisher, including one in which he asked Fisher to call Enron’s lenders as they decided whether to extend credit to the company.

Upon watching the documentary, one could conclude that Enron’s bosses created a culture of pushing limits and taking risks. From the movie, we understand that Jeff Skilling was known to be a nerd as well as others within Enron. It seemed as though Jeff had woken up one day and decided to change himself by wearing contacts instead of glasses, changing is wardrobe, and doing some modeling. As he changed, so did others who worked under him for the fact that they saw Skilling as their hero. With time, it has been noted that Jeff became some sort of tragic figure. He became a man who was radically different than how he portrays himself. It was known that Skilling was a huge risk taker and he often talked about, and then started to manifest in trips that he began to lead with small groups and customers that were often times dangerous. These

Finance and accounting remain the core of the Enron story, but the company's cowboy culture -- and the way top bosses such as Mr. Fastow and former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling inspired it -- are also key to understanding what happened in this historic business debacle. Only now is the full scope becoming apparent, amid government probes and a growing willingness by some former and current employees to speak about it.

Being blinded by the mirage of wealth is a common theme across periods of time, literature, and American society; those who are plagued by this illusion become disconnected from what’s most important - their family and their own beliefs. Ellen Goodman’s “The Company Man” uses rhetorical devices to satirize her negative attitude towards the death of a typical workaholic and makes an invective attack on the corporate industry that sees its workers as disposable cogs in their machine.

The word “fraud” was magnified in the business world around the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002. No one had seen anything like it. Enron, one of the country’s largest energy companies, went bankrupt and took down with it Arthur Andersen, one of the five largest audit and accounting firms in the world. Enron was followed by other accounting scandals such as WorldCom, Tyco, Freddie Mac, and HealthSouth, yet Enron will always be remembered as one of the worst corporate accounting scandals of all time. Enron’s collapse was brought upon by the greed of its corporate hierarchy and how it preyed upon its faithful stockholders and employees who invested so much of their time and money into the company. Enron seemed to portray that the goal of corporate America was to drive up stock prices and get to the peak of the financial mountain by any means necessary. The “Conspiracy of Fools” is a tale of power, crony capitalism, and company greed that lead Enron down the dark road of corporate America.

In “The Company Man” by Ellen Goodman, The author attacks a typical hardworking middle classmen. This piece portrays diction, imagery and tone in order to exemplify the intended theme the author wants to convey. With these attributes, the theme that those who tend to be blinded by the illusion of wealth and tend to forget those who are important in their lives are destined to die lonely and disregarded by those closest to them.

Enron’s use of informal or social control as a means of guiding employee actions contributed to its illegal actions forwarded by a pervasively negative culture and led to the ultimate downfall of the firm. In order to examine how Enron made a greater use of social control than formal control, this paper will first propose frameworks that describe what social control are formal control are. Then, it will use key details from the documentary to show how Enron’s culture fit the a framework of social control that generated its actions. Finally, the paper will discuss how formal controls were in place but, display how these formal controls were minimized and not the primary catalysts through a discussion of espoused values. These arguments will then show how Enron’s greater use of social control to direct the actions of its employees led to the bankruptcy of the company and loss of the employees’ pension and life savings.

Ellen Goodman’s, “The Company Man,” reveals the legacy left behind after a man named Phil dies of overworking. The workaholic has no lasting relationships formed with his family and is easily replaceable at his job he worked so hard to achieve. Through the use of many rhetorical devices, Goodman’s disappointment and distaste of Phil and the obsessive American working class is apparent.

When looking at the issue of corporate crime, it becomes apparent that gender is a factor that can play a significant role. Within the article An Ethnography of Wall Street, it is described that because of a social hierarchy, the majority of those in CEO positions are white males while those in lower positions tend to be more females. As discussed in the documentary Inside Job, the males in corporations featured tended to be impulsive risk takers which can be related to the idea of “doing masculinity”. Using these sources, one is able to create a critique of the theory emancipation in accordance to corporate crime. Through the analysis of the documentary Inside Job and the article An Ethnography of Wall Street, it can be determined that corporations are gendered and are based around a sense of masculinity.

As with much of Enron, their outward appearance did not match what was really going on inside the company. Enron ended up cultivating their own demise for bankruptcy by how they ran their company. This corrupt corporate culture was a place whose employees threw ethical responsibility to the wind if it meant financial gain. At Enron, the employees were motivated by a very “cut-throat” culture. If an employee didn’t perform well enough, they would simply be replaced by someone who could. “The company’s culture had profound effects on the ethics of its employees” (Sims, pg.243). Like a parent to their children, when the executives of a company pursue unethical financial means, it sets a certain tone for their employees and even the market of the company. As mentioned before, Enron had a very “cut-throat” attitude in regards to their employees. This also became one Enron’s main ethical falling points. According to the class text, “employees were rated every six months, with those ranked in the bottom 20 percent forced to leave” (Ferrell, 2017, pg. 287). This system which pits employees against each other rather than having them work together will create a workplace of dishonesty and a recipe of disaster for the company. This coupled with the objective of financial growth, creates a very dim opportunity for any ethical culture. “The entire cultural framework of Enron not only allowed unethical behavior to flourish,

“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” shows us how basic human nature does not change, whether it is firing as a means to resolve disputes, or in the

The book is written by two authors: Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins. Mimi Swartz is a journalist who graduated from Hampshire College. She has written for many publications. Her work has been included in Slate, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Currently, she serves as an executive editor for Texas Monthly. Ms. Swartz is a long time resident of Texas, and was able to use her experiences and insight into the Texan psyche to highlight the personalities of the Texas company and the attitude of its employees. Sherron Watkins has a Bachelor 's in Business Administration from the University of Texas and a Master 's in Professional Accounting, also from the University of Texas. She went to work at the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, which was the accounting firm that handled Enron 's books. After Arthur Anderson, Watkins worked for three years at MG Trade Finance, a division of Metallgesellschaft AG, a large conglomerate that specialized in mining, chemicals, and finance. Watkins went to Enron after MG, where she stayed from 1993 until 2002, following its infamous bankruptcy. Sherron Watkins worked at many different portions of Enron, eventually becoming a vice president. She was one of the whistleblowers regarding Enron 's failure,

All of the prior represents the business side of the downfall of Enron. That being said, businesses fail all of the time. The reason why Enron Corporation and its executives will always live in infamy is not because the company failed, but how and why the company failed. How, exactly, does a company worth about $70 million collapse in less than a month? It became clear that the company not only had financial problems, but ethical problems that started from the top of the company and trickled down. A key player in these problems was Jeffrey Skilling. He was a man brought to the company by Ken Lay himself. Skilling brought his own accounting concept to the company. It was called mark-to-market accounting. This concept allowed Enron to record potential profits the day a deal was signed. This meant that the company could report whatever they “thought” profits from the deal were going to be and count the number towards actual profits, even if no money actually came in. Mark-to-market accounting granted Enron the power to report major profits to the public, even if they were little or even negative. It became a major way

The Enron Scandal was an enormous controversy in 2001. This scandal went on for years until finally the government caught up with what was going on. In the Enron case, the company was stating that they were making profits from assets even though they were not making any money from it. They would also transfer any information to an off-the-books corporation if they were not making as much as they thought that they should be making. All this information would be unreported so that nobody would know that the company was losing money.

Most of the world has heard of Enron, the American, mega-energy company that “cooked their books” ( ) and cost their investors billions of dollars in lost earnings and retirement funds. While much of the controversy surrounding the Enron scandal focused on the losses of investors, unethical practices of executives and questionable accounting tactics, there were many others within close proximity to the turmoil. It begs the question- who was really at fault and what has been done to prevent it from happening again?