The documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” deals with “one of the most America's largest corporate bankruptcy”, as it reports the documentary itself. In fact, few years before the bankrupt, Enron was the 7th largest corporation in the USA that took 16 years to go from 10 billion assets to approximately 65 billion, but in only 24 days it went bankrupt.
The movie describes and analyses how the company grew and then collapsed quickly and surrounded by a gigantic scandal that can be seen as pride but also as arrogance, intolerance and greed.
From one side it can be considered as pride because the people involved didn’t want to admit that they were going down. Even when people started noticing the inconsistency on data and some contradictions, …show more content…
For this reason, they started acting dishonestly and more they cheated, more ideas they had to come up with in order to disguise the truth.
Of course, they were exposed to stress and tension as they were performing bad and they had to manipulate the reality, they had to be creative and always invent new ways to cheat as failure was not an option.
They did not stop acting like this even after the Valhalla Scandal where, for the first time, people doubted of the integrity, truthfulness and moral rectitude of Enron.
To cover the reality, they soon started to create offshore phony books, to present falsified bank records and to destroy daily trading records. Fastow created many companies such as LJM to make debts disappear. This is also an example of conflict of interest as Fastow had to choose between the interests of Enron and those of the other companies.
When this fact was brought to the attention of the board of directors, Lay decision was to do nothing and, on the contrary, he encouraged the traders to gamble more. Soon, they gambled away all the reserves and they had to bluff the …show more content…
It was a Darwinian approach were employees graded other employees and decided whether to fire them or not. This shows the lack of a policy to regulate the HR inside the company.
To protect their unfair game and the illusion they created, they had to attach and push away everyone who was against them. Examples can be John Olson who was fired because he did not recommend investing in the company or the journalist Mclean who has been accused of unmoral behaviour for having investigated the financial conditions of Enron.
The main theme that the documentary deals with is the theme of the corruption. In Enron the executives and the managers were charismatic, open-minded and self-confident men. They were smart, result oriented and motivational leaders. Those qualities are important to be good leaders, but the impressive thing is that they use bad those traits of their personalities. Once they started gambling and bluffing they had to keep playing this game to protect their reputation and involved more and more people in exchange of money and benefits.
I think it is important that leaders follow moral and ethical principles and that they are
The movie describes and analyses how the company grew and then collapsed quickly and surrounded by a gigantic scandal that can be seen as pride but also as arrogance, intolerance and greed.
From one side it can be considered as pride because the people involved didn’t want to admit that they were going down. Even when people started noticing the inconsistency on data and some contradictions, …show more content…
For this reason, they started acting dishonestly and more they cheated, more ideas they had to come up with in order to disguise the truth.
Of course, they were exposed to stress and tension as they were performing bad and they had to manipulate the reality, they had to be creative and always invent new ways to cheat as failure was not an option.
They did not stop acting like this even after the Valhalla Scandal where, for the first time, people doubted of the integrity, truthfulness and moral rectitude of Enron.
To cover the reality, they soon started to create offshore phony books, to present falsified bank records and to destroy daily trading records. Fastow created many companies such as LJM to make debts disappear. This is also an example of conflict of interest as Fastow had to choose between the interests of Enron and those of the other companies.
When this fact was brought to the attention of the board of directors, Lay decision was to do nothing and, on the contrary, he encouraged the traders to gamble more. Soon, they gambled away all the reserves and they had to bluff the …show more content…
It was a Darwinian approach were employees graded other employees and decided whether to fire them or not. This shows the lack of a policy to regulate the HR inside the company.
To protect their unfair game and the illusion they created, they had to attach and push away everyone who was against them. Examples can be John Olson who was fired because he did not recommend investing in the company or the journalist Mclean who has been accused of unmoral behaviour for having investigated the financial conditions of Enron.
The main theme that the documentary deals with is the theme of the corruption. In Enron the executives and the managers were charismatic, open-minded and self-confident men. They were smart, result oriented and motivational leaders. Those qualities are important to be good leaders, but the impressive thing is that they use bad those traits of their personalities. Once they started gambling and bluffing they had to keep playing this game to protect their reputation and involved more and more people in exchange of money and benefits.
I think it is important that leaders follow moral and ethical principles and that they are