The Smartest Guys In The Room

There’s no known cure for greed. That said, the fall of Enron was inevitable from its inception, for whichever way the head goes, the body follows and with Ken Lay as the head, one could expect nothing less. Can a rotten tree produce good fruit?
My initial response to the movie, “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, was to discuss Lay and Skilling. But a more careful consideration of the matter, I had to admit that they really weren’t the problem, even though they were the deed doers. None of anything they did could have been done without a lot of looking the other way and stamps of approval from both internal guards like the Board of Directors and external ones like Anderson Accounting, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), and a whole bunch of fat cat politicians, both Republicans and Democrats whose campaigns received hefty and perhaps questionable donations from Lay and Enron. One can only imagine why only a handful of people were prosecuted, when there were oh so many more who were equally if not guiltier than they. …show more content…
As evidenced by the movie, the more they could get away with the better. For example, the mark to market accounting, the real undoing of Enron, is an inflated accounting technique allowing its user to treat future projected earnings as income today. This is highly unconventional accounting method by the way, was approved by the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) after being sought by Skilling. The whole purpose of which allowed Skilling to hide how Enron was really, but not really, making money. When it was all over, Enron, the 7th largest corporation in America was nothing more than a two-bit organized crime operation wielding a corporate shield of