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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a gripping and witty telling of the Enron saga, based on the book by
Fortune magazine writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. This is doubly
good news: good both that the story is being told, and that it's being
told in an accessible way. For despite the fact that Enron is the
biggest business scandal in recent years ? perhaps the biggest ever ? most people have surprisingly little
understanding of what actually went on at Enron. Most people you ask can tell
you that Enron employees lost jobs, that investors lost lots of money,
and that the reason for it all had something to do with
corporate greed and with dishonesty at the executive level. But few
people can explain just what it was that Enron execs did wrong, and
fewer still understand the complexity of the Enron saga, or the range
of players who were necessarily complicit in America's greatest
case of corporate fraud.
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One of the very best things about
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is that not a single ethics
professor appears in the film. Not that I have anything against ethics
professors
? I happen to be
one myself. It's just that, for the most part, you don't need advanced
training in ethics to see that what went on at Enron was bad. So in
an age of deference to expertise, it's refreshing that this film
settles for telling the story of Enron, and lets viewers arrive at the
obvious moral conclusions on their own.
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Of course, this is not to say that there's nothing interesting to say, ethically,
about what happened at Enron. The story is actually much more
complicated than headlines would lead you to believe. Indeed, there's lots that can be, and has been,
said about the lessons that the Enron story holds for corporate
America, and indeed for corporations world-wide. Philosopher and
management pundits have offered up a range of perspectives on what
went wrong at Enron, and why. And while this movie does
speculate about what made it all happen
? was it arrogance? greed? hasty
deregulation of the power industry? cynical manipulation of the human
tendency to follow orders? ? its greatest strength lies,
perhaps, in its refusal to focus on a single, easy answer. Conspiracy
theorists will surely be disappointed, but the complicated scenario
painted by this movie is surely closer to the truth.
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