Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The thing I liked most about this documentary was the fact that it focused on the guys at the top, the self-proclaimed "smartest men in the room", the so-called geniuses who knew the energy business so much better than the rest of the industry. And what a piece of work these men were.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room shows us how basic human nature does not change, whether it's in the easy fall into killing as a means to resolve disputes, or in the incessant human obsession to acquire for acquisition's sake. This all makes for terrible human actions.

One particular sequence of the film shows a series of Enron commercials that feature the Enron motto ask why. This rings almost like a corporate version of a Jack the Ripper taunt to the police: come and get us!

The three main crooks Chairman Ken Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling, and CFO Andrew Fastow, are as off the rack as they come. Fastow was skimming from Enron by ripping off the con artists who showed him how to steal, by hiding Enron debt in dummy corporations, and getting rich off of it. Opportunity theory is ever present because since this scam was done once without penalty, it was done plenty of more times with ease. Skilling however, was the typical amoral nerd, with delusions of grandeur, who wanted to mess around with others because he was ridiculed as a kid, implementing an absurd rank and yank policy that led to employees grading each other, with the lowest graded people being fired. Structural humiliation played a direct role in shaping Skilling's thoughts and future actions. This did not mean the worst employees were fired, only the least popular, or those who were not afraid to tell the truth. Thus, the corrupt culture of Enron was born. At one point, in an inter...

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...se of pride, participated in deviant acts to reward themselves and the company. All of this behavior occurred under a veil of fantasy imagery, so employees neutralized feelings about unethical behavior allowing them to accept and reproduce it. Facilitated by organizational conditions such as the ‘rank-and yank' system and the wider political economy, this unique configuration of ritualized practices contributed to the company's implosion.

In conclusion, a unique arrangement of ritualized meanings and behaviors permeated

the social world of Enron. The fact that they took the form they did and to such a pronounced degree are certainly troubling and perhaps surprising. What should not be surprising is the role such ritualization processes played in the development of this type of deviance, given recognition of their importance in social relationships and organizations.