Stream enron the smartest guys in the room
15), offer a lens by which we can view managers and organizations. Management theories, such as the Competing Values Framework (CVF Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, McGrath, & St. This article will examine how these managers shaped the organization’s corporate culture and changed management strategy which was the foundation of the organization’s early successes and later failures. The focus will be on the organization’s top managers, their roles and behaviors and how these contributed to managerial successes and mistakes. This article will not focus on the accounting scandal-the mark-to-market accounting, the special purpose entities and the hedge funds that Enron established to prop up earnings-but the human side of a company which experienced tremendous success for a short time and then colossal failure. However, Enron should not be viewed as an aberration, but as something that can happen again (Gibney, 2005). In the wake of the Enron and other corporate accounting scandals, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002. Lives that were valued at millions were reduced to $20,000. Accounting firm Arthur Anderson was convicted of obstructing justice, and 29,000 people at the firm lost their jobs. Everything they had worked for was gone when $2 billion in pensions disappeared. Meanwhile, 20,000 Enron employees lost jobs and health insurance. Enron CEO Jeff Skilling unloaded his stock while encouraging employees to keep their shares. While corporate leaders assured employees that there were no accounting irregularities, they quietly sold their stock in the preceding months before the bankruptcy occurred in December 2001. Employees and shareholders were kept in the dark about the company’s finances. “How exactly did Enron make its money?” asked Bethany McLean, a reporter for Fortune magazine who was the first to question Enron’s finances in March 2001 (Gibney, 2005).Īfter September 11, 2001, the Securities Exchange Commission launched an investigation into Enron. The financial press, however, began to ask questions about Enron’s finances. The traders had gambled away all of Enron’s reserves, and Lay had known all along about the risks (Gibney, 2005).įrom 1998 to 2000, Enron’s gross revenues rose from $31 billion to more than $100 billion. There was a 1987 investigation of two Enron executives at the oil trading unit in Valhalla, New York that revealed offshore accounts and phony books. Enron transformed into a high-tech global enterprise that diversified into trading energy, water, weather derivatives, broadband and electricity.Įarly on, problems at Enron emerged. In 1988, the deregulation of electrical power markets took effect, and Enron transformed from a traditional natural gas energy company focused on energy delivery through gas pipelines to an energy broker company that brought buyers and sellers together (Sims & Brinkmann, 2003). However, in the words of Stein and Pinto (2011), “Our understanding of what transpired at Enron is by no means complete.”Įnron was created in 1986 from a merger of Houston National Gas and InterNorth (a natural gas pipeline company) with Ken Lay as its chair and CEO (Stein & Pinto, 2011).
#Stream enron the smartest guys in the room movie
Enron’s rise and fall is the focus of numerous articles in the mainstream, trade and scholarly literature along with mass market books as well as the movie that forms the basis of this paper, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (Gibney, 2005). Instead of warning the traders, Ken Lay asked the traders to keep making millions for the company which simultaneously increased the risk.Enron is a story about America’s largest corporate failure at that point in history-and a story about human tragedy. Few employees tried to warn Ken Lay about the illicit trading his traders were involved in but ken Lay discouraged them by informing that speculation was the only part of business making money. Top Executives had offshore personal accounts and transferred millions of dollars in profits. While such speculations were risky, Enron seemed to own a winning streak during the initial stage. In the early stage, traders of Enron were involved in speculating the prices of oil. Ken Lay along with few Texas based oil companies shared a common view that deregulation is the key for success. Bush election campaign stressed on deregulating the energy market. Enron being the major corporate contributor for the George W. The key players in the scandal were Chairman Kenneth Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling and CFO Andrew Fastow. The top executives made millions by cooking the books and hiding all the materialistic information from the customers. Within no matter of time, the company was bankrupt. The movie begins with a lady describing the company as one filled with arrogance, intolerance and greed which led to a gigantic fraud.