The Smartest Guys in the Room

The spring semester at Marquette started up a couple weeks ago and I'm taking two classes, Investments and Organizational Behavior (OB). The OB class is focused on case analysis and class discussion and could turn out to be one of the better classes that I've taken since we have a very diverse group of students and a good instructor. In class, Enron came up during a discussion about organizational ethics and culture. Everyone's heard the stories. Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow dumping millions of dollars in shares while telling employees to hold onto their stock. Fantasy accounting signed-off by Arther Anderson. Thousands of employees and shareholders losing everything. No mea culpas. How could it happen? How could so many in and outside the company be duped, choose to look away, or even contribute to its duplicity?

This video (based on a book of similar title) does a wonderful job telling the Enron story and it seems to take a pretty unbiased look at how corruption and greed, internal and external, brought down one of America's biggest companies.

(The picture came from Amazon.com where you can buy the movie.)