Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room

Enron Corporation’s failure in the year of 2001 has become a depiction of unethical corporate behavior for years to come. After having watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; I found many organizational communications course concepts could be brought to our attention within the documentary. To further our understanding, I will offer my insight as to how class-related concepts connect with the documentary by discussing how Enron developed strong organizational values by identifying certain heroes and their stories that developed their sense of strong risk taking as well as discussing Enron’s “rank and yank” system that can be asserted with F.W. Taylor’s work within

Enron’s ride is quite a phenomenon: from a regional gas pipeline trader to the largest energy trader in the world, and then back down the hill into bankruptcy and disgrace. As a matter of fact, it took Enron 16 years to go from about $10 billion of assets to $65 billion of assets, and 24 days to go bankruptcy. Enron is also one of the most celebrated business ethics cases in the century. There are so many things that went wrong within the organization, from all personal (prescriptive and psychological approaches), managerial (group norms, reward system, etc.), and organizational (world-class culture) perspectives. This paper will focus on the business ethics issues at Enron that were raised from the documentation Enron: The Smartest Guys

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.

Q 1: Evaluate Enron profit and cash flow performance during the period 1998 – 2000?

The Enron corporation was an amalgamation of Houston Natural Gas and Internorth two of the largest natural gas suppliers in the United States. It was built upon the company 's ability to convince congress to deregulate the sale of natural gas through supplying electrical pieces at market prices. This allowed Enron to begin to sell power at higher prices therefore driving their revenue up. The company also began to spread its grasp out of natural gas and into a myriad of other power sources across the globe including water, pulp and paper plants. This was all done through a massive series of loopholes and massive amounts of money being funneled into Congress to lobby against regulations of such activities.

Bryn Bradshaw-Mack “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”: A Legal Perspective Often times in business as the stakes get bigger and better, the methods in which they are obtained get worse. Throughout the film, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”, this unfortunate truth is frequently apparent. There are numerous instances when Enron executives perform potentially unlawful practices in order to profit the company, and subsequently themselves. One example of this is when Jeffrey Skilling, chief executive officer at the time, demanded that Enron’s accounting system be changed to “aggressive accounting” in order to hide the company’s debt and mislead its investors.

White collar crimes are occurring without anyone realizing it. Who has the time or the energy to make sure that all the big companies are following exactly what they are suppose to do. After reading the text as well as watching the movie, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” it allowed me to ponder the idea, what can be done to limit/lessen the amount of white collar crime occurring.

According to Johnson (2012) leaders are powerful role models, and policies will have a little effect if leaders do not follow the rules they set. In Enron case, corruption and ethical misconduct were deeply embedded in their business culture where profitability was more important than ethics. In this paper, I will address the factors that had led to the development of the culture of profit before principle at Enron. Also, I will create my personal code of ethics that will guide me in my professional and personal decision making and doing the right thing when faced with ethical challenges.

The thing I liked most about this documentary was the fact that it focused on the guys at the top, the self-proclaimed "smartest men in the room", the so-called geniuses who knew the energy business so much better than the rest of the industry. And what a piece of work these men were.

When managing an MNC, managers are expected to make decisions that will maximize the stock price. Managers at Enron were trying to do exactly that, and it worked well for a while. Even though what they were doing might have been a fraud or illegal, they focused in trying to keep their stock prices as highest as they could.

In the film “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” directed by Alex Gibney, Enron was one of the largest Corporate energy based Company in America that went into bankruptcy in 2001. Ethics are based on a system of sound moral principles and philosophies that may be considered morally right. In the film ‘Enron’, a lot of ethically ambiguous practices are seen in the form of actions, affirmative statements, omissions and schemes. One such ethically ambiguous practice was ‘mark- to- market accounting’ where one can “book potential future profit” just by speculation as to whatever you wanted your profit to be.

Enron began in July 1985, and its headquarters were in Houston. It started from a small regional energy supplier. However, Enron was dissatisfied with the traditional way of doing business, so it began to look toward energy security. Enron 's management believed that the creation of derivative securities market for any commodity was possible, so Enron developed energy commodity futures, options, and other financial derivatives. Energy deregulation brought this company great commercial opportunities. Enron was considered to be a model of the innovative company. Because of the deregulation, it became a trader of everything from oil and gas futures to weather derivatives. They took a new strategy by setting up a “gas bank”. Later, the generation of electricity forced Enron to explore new industrial customers for its gas. From 1990 to 2000, Enron largely expanded their oversea business. In 1994, Enron began buying and selling electricity. After Skilling became the COO and Fastow became the CFO of the company, Enron continued to implement dual strategies of expanding its trading activities and synchronously investing a lot of money in physical assets. Enron’s shares, in the late 1990s, had significantly outperformed the market even when the market fell.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room documents succinctly and effectively the questionable ethical decisions made by the Enron Corporation. While many of these decisions transpired, one in particular exemplifies a particular business ethic more accurately than the rest. When California had its first major power outage, Enron noticed the cost for power increase exponentially and immediately sought to exploit this fact. Timothy Belden, the leader of the exploitation, found numerous ways to force Californians to pay more for the energy Enron sold. The documentary defined these transactions as “arbitrage”, as traders bought and sold electricity for a profit by manipulating the market.

Ethics in the business world can often times become a second priority behind the gaining of profits and success as a company. This is the controversial issue that led to the Enron scandal and ultimately the fall of this company. Enron Corporation was an energy company, and in the peaks of their success, they were the top supplier of natural gas and electricity throughout America. Enron Corporation came about from a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. Houston Natural Gas was a gas providing company formed in Houston during the 1920’s. InterNorth was a company formed in Nebraska during the 1930’s and owned one of America’s largest pipeline networks. In 1985, Sam Segnar, the CEO of InterNorth bought out Houston Natural Gas for $2.4 billion. A year later in 1986, Segnar retired and was replaced by Kenneth Lay, who renamed the company and created Enron. Enron was the owner of the second largest pipeline in America that measured over 36,000 miles. The company was also the creator of the “Gas Bank”, which was a new way to trade and market natural gas and served as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. As the company continued to develop, it became more of a trader rather than a producer of gas. This trading extended into coal, steel, water and many other areas. One of Enron’s largest successes was their creation of a website called, “Enron Online” in 1999, which quickly became one of the top trading cites in the world. By the year 2000 Enron as a company was

The story of Enron begins in 1985, with the merger of two pipeline companies, orchestrated by a man named Kenneth L. Lay (1). In its 15 years of existence, Enron expanded its operations to provide products and services in the areas of electricity, natural gas as well as communications (9). Through its diversification, Enron would become known as a corporate America darling (9) and Fortune Magazine’s most innovative company for 5 years in a row (10). They reported extraordinary profits in a short amount of time. For example, in 1998 Enron shares were valued at a little over $20, while in mid-2000, those same shares were valued at just over $90 (10), the all-time high during the company’s existence (9).