Ethics and Leadership Failures: The Enron Case
Gibney's 2005 documentary film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room reveals some of the main ethical weaknesses in an unbridled neoliberal capitalist market system. Barely addressing environmental and social justice issues, the filmmakers instead choose to focus on organizational culture, leadership, and ethical decision making within the corporation. The film illustrates the core concepts of business ethics and shows how executives shape company values and behaviors. Disturbingly, the Enron case also shows how unethical corporate behavior is linked with unethical behavior in government.
Summarize in one paragraph how you would explain Enron's ethical meltdown
Enron's ethical meltdown is a result of two interrelated issues: unethical individuals making unethical decisions, and an organizational culture that enables unethical decisions to proliferate. The unethical decisions and behaviors mainly have to do with stock market manipulation and the falsifying of information related to the actual performance of the firm. By fooling the market into believing that Enron was making money, it attracted increased shareholder revenues and proceeded to bull its way through the system unnoticed by regulators. The organizational culture at Enron was actually oriented towards manipulating the market almost as if it were the company mission -- the culture was also strictly oriented towards performance because the bottom 15% of employees would be fired every year. So it was more than competitive, and the human resources systems did not build in anything that would prevent unethical behavior to meet targets. There are therefore two separate issues related to Enron's culture: first the orientation of its executives towards falsifying information and the second in the organization's hyper-competitive atmosphere. That atmosphere has more to do with human resources and labor issues than...
Enron Leadership Enron collapsed very quickly in November 2001, and its failure should have been a warning to serious dysfunctions in the entire corporate and financial system, but this did not happen. Its executives admitted that they had falsified its records going back for at least five years, although in reality they had been doing so since the 1980s. When the company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy it laid off over 20,000
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Obviously, everyone wants to be seen as an innovative, risk-taker, but having a vision is necessary to decide what risks are worth taking. Although it is unstated, your subject, Stephen Czarowski, the music and choir director at your church, St., John the Baptist in Silver Spring must have a (realistic but challenging) vision of how the music people are playing should sound, which he urges people to realize. Although
From all facts and appearances, those Enron executives gave lip service to ethics, then went on their own way, making as much profit as they could while the company teetered on collapse. One final example from Enron's "Code of Ethics" is titled "Twenty-Twenty Hindsight" which carries its own irony without delving into its points. Lay writes on page 10 that if any employees' security activities or transactions "become the subject
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