How Did The Enron Debacle Happen? Documentary Film Blames Moneymaking As Company's Only Core...

In retrospect, there's something sadly symbolic about the crooked 'E' that served as Enron's logo, and a new documentary film vividly illustrates why. "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room" is a striking and sad autopsy of a company that nurtured and fostered the dark side of business. The important legal issues - who did what, when they did it, who knew or approved, who was indicted or convicted - pale when they stand beside the bigger picture: A culture that rewarded greed and price-gouging, that hid the financial truth, and that curtly dismissed basic human decency in pursuit of yet another dollar. The conversations of Enron's energy traders, replayed in taped telephone conversations and emails, reveal that as long as Enron was making money, those hyenas and the jackals they worked for had no qualms about "Grandma Millie" dropping dead of heat stroke during California's energy crisis. Cruelty was not frowned upon by Enron energy traders, and the company's top executives, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, were all too willing to look the other way as long as profits rolled in.

The traders were in control and were totally out of control, the movie points out: They were running the show and running amok. Such a paradox would not have been possible without the culture and reward system implemented at the very top. To some extent, all businesses are smeared by the lingering notion presented by the movie that business without ethics is business as usual.

It was a great film. Our biggest disappointment is that the role of Arthur Andersen was glossed over. Aside from a few references to the complicity of Enron's accountants and lawyers (as well as other stakeholders, such as the banking world and Merrill Lynch), the film paints a story of the rise and fall of an ethics-free company, the human toll of its collapse, and its executives' utter failure to comprehend that they were responsible for any of it.