Final paper – Applying My Ideas to Enron

I want to use this as an opportunity to elaborate on some thoughts I’ve had regarding my final paper. Obviously we have spent a lot of time talking about Enron as an organization, and I think that the three themes I am covering in my paper can definitely be applied to Enron. First, I’ll recap [...]

Right and Wrong

       In “Homecoming” there was a definite breaking of American law.  Avon Barksdale, Stringer Bell, Marlo Stanfield, and others were participating in drug trading and assault. To all intents and purposes, what they did was illegal and un-American. Although they operated a drug trade business, few legitimate businesses would operate under the same terms as them. [...]

No One Raindrop thinks it Caused the Flood

After reading about Enron, I wondered a lot about the social phenomenon known as Diffusion of Responsibility. This phenomenon takes places when any one individual feels he does not bare the burden of responsibility because there are many others present that can instead. When an event occurs that requires a response, the individual assumes that [...]

Enron = normal … accident, that is.

Enron = normal … accident, that is. A normal accident implies that given an organization, various unpredicted failures will occur.  As we see in Organizations and Organizing, “it is virtually impossible to predict and protect against all the ways in which such systems can fail.”  This term poses a lot of debate, because it is [...]

Organizational Learning

Article Title: “Different Truths in Different Worlds”, 2008 By: Kent D. Miller and Shu-Jou Lin The basis of this article rests upon dispelling the common notion that organizations are simply a product of their environment.  Through a constructivist ontology that assumes malleability of the organization’s environment, Miller and Lin argue that organizations, based on the [...]

The Power of People: Who’s in Control?

In Andrew Pettigrew’s Handbook of Strategy and Management, chapter 11 titled, Top Management, Company Directors and Corporate Control, lays out the various influences that key stakeholders have within a corporation. In this viewpoint, these stakeholders include internal executives, managers, low-level employees, and the external stakeholders of a corporation, including analysts, critics, and investors. To begin, [...]

Exploration and Exploitation

In his article Exploration and Exploitation, James March stresses the importance of balance between the two.  An organization with exploration and limited exploitation suffers the cost of experimentation without gaining many of its benefits. The company will have too many underdeveloped ideas and too little distinctive competence. And vice versa, an organization that focuses on [...]

A Penny for Your Thoughts

According to the New York Times, the former president of CountryWide Financial, Stanford L. Kurland, is back in the loan business, but this time seemingly profiting off of his screwups. CountryWide Financial (yes, I know Wikipedia) was one of the largest lenders of U.S. mortgages. Many of its loans were to high risk home owners [...]

Duck Test

If it looks like a scam, swims like a scam, and quacks like a scam, then it probably is a scam; for heaven’s sake they were called Fat Boy, Death Star, Get Shorty, and Ricochet. I know we beat these deals like a dead horse, but I am still a little fired up.

Justifying Actions by Reducing Dissonance at Enron

I wanted to use this as an opportunity to expand on the reference to “cognitive dissonance” I made in class. This is a psychological theory that explains the behavior of individuals who experience an uncomfortable feeling caused by recognizing two contradicting ideas simultaneously. These ideas can either refer to beliefs held by the individual, or [...]

Enron’s cousin: WorldCom

While reading about the mess Enron created in Smartest Guy’s in the Room, I couldn’t help but think to myself…there is no possible way Enron could have been the only company manipulating accounts in order to bolster their Wal-Street value, especially during a time of unprecedented stock booms. After about three seconds surfing with my [...]

Beaten into Submission

Everyone loves Enron, or I guess I should say loved.  Analysts, Wall Street, investors, traders, you name it; they all were loyal to Enron.  It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon, be beaten into submission by Enron, and end up as a friendly ally and some green in your pocket.  But I like the non-conformist.  Anyone [...]

Pretty Woman

Aside from all of the testosterone that was brewing and stirring at Enron, Rebecca Mark managed to have one of the most impactful yet seemingly detrimental roles of any executive at Enron.  When Rebecca Mark was handed Enron Development, it was only a concept without any employees, let alone contracts or a solid business model.  [...]

Enron: A Biased View

Through our analysis of The Smartest Guys in the Room, I have had a hard time believing that Enron, as big as it was, was able to get away with so many “illegal” activities for such a long period of time. It is hard to accept the fact that the way our society is structured [...]

Lesson Learned from Enron

I stumbled across this as I was reading more on Enron, here are the 5 Lessons Learned from Enron. The one lesson that stood out in my mind was lesson number five: Lesson Five: The secretary probably knows what’s really going on. Talk to the people doing the work, not the ones spinning the story.

Enron: Who’s Accountable?

This is a neat (and quite detailed) study of the Enron case that was published by Time in January 2002. Check it out here… Enron: Who’s Accountable?

When the wind blows, the house of cards will fall

Regulators say Mr. Madoff himself estimated that $50 billion in personal and institutional wealth from around the world was gone…… Even though Enron was a legitimate business, its finances were all a scam. Many of its financial workarounds were legal, but all had the intention to make assets appear on the balance sheet or debt [...]

Enron’s Population

The population of Enron was unrivaled—and maybe that was the problem. That probably doesn’t make much sense, so let me explain. From a population perspective or organizational analysis, for any given actor, whether ant or multinational corporation, the most relevant occupants of the environment are other actors of the same kind (Scott and Davis). Populations [...]

Mensalao – a product of Loose Coupling?

Mensalao- the term became a familiar one in Brazilian politics after the 2005 scandal when a congressman told the newspaper about a scheme of monthly payments to congressmen of two political parties in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars, to vote in favor of what the “Workers Party” brought to the floor. After reading about [...]

Preventing Human Nature

While reading about the debacle and collapse of Enron, I find myself constantly drawing connections between the largest bankruptcy in U.S history, and the pending doom faced by our nation’s banks. Before the U.S began to expirience an economic downturn, both Enron, and our nations banking powerhouses, such as Citigroup, both strongly resisted government regulation. [...]

Enrons Visions and Values: What are they hiding?

As I was reading about goals in Organizations and Organizing (Scott and Davis) I immediately thought of Enron. The in the above video Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling discuss what they want the public

Reading The Smartest Guys in the Room has certainly confirmed one thing: I am glad I am not headed toward a career in finance.  Assets, liabilities, balance sheets, special purpose entities; all concepts I am happy to have left behind in accounting.  Putting these terms aside, I decided to put my interest in marketing into [...]

The Enron Elixir

As I’m sure is the case with many of my fellow classmates, a lot of things just bother me when I read The Smartest Guys in the Room.  Maybe the word choice of “bother” is an understatement – let’s go with infuriate instead.   And here’s one of the main things I simply cannot get my [...]

To be Ethical, or not to be Ethical…..

What would you do in the following solution? Knowing full well that there is scientific proof that there cigarettes are lethal AND nicotine is addictive, would you work for Philip Morris (one of the largest cigarette manufacturers in the U.S.)? Just to make things interesting let’s say that you beginning salary is six figured with [...]

Places I Don’t See Hierarchies: 1) Enron…

Our discussion in the beginning of class today about hierarchies in companies really made me question whether or not you can even apply the concept to Enron. I know that there are different types of hierarchies, but I looked up the definition just to see if I could apply it to Enron even in the [...]