Enron: Smartest Guy in the Room

Position Paper- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room movie

Ericka B.

Marygrove College

HRM

655

Position Paper- Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room movie

After viewing this movie, I have to say that it was quite interesting and extremely sad. The whole “Enron Scandal” was such a huge story when it first came out. From what I knew already was that Enron was an American energy commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. The company filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron employed approximately 20,000 staff and was one of the world’s major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper companies with claimed revenues of $111 billion during 2000. (Enron-Wikipedia, 2015) What was so unethical was that Enron’s financial condition was sustained considerably by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal. This also affected the greater business world by causing the dissolution of the Arthur Anderson accounting firm. It was very sad to see how much a person and or persons were willing to go to make money.

Enron seemed liked they had so much promise in the beginning and they really could have been a successful and possible long lasting company. Power, greed, and making money was the motivation, but it assassinated Enron in the long run.

All of the big wigs seemed to have had very good educations. Ken Lay, founder appeared to have come from a good family. He was raised in a traditional Baptist home with a Baptist preacher for a father. The movie did an excellent job of breaking everything down from beginning to end. My position was trying to understand three things: Who was responsible? Why did it happen? And how do you prevent this from happening again? In our readings, the book states that “The watershed event that brought the ethics of finance to prominence at the beginning of the twenty-first century was the collapse of the Enron Corporation and its accounting...