Business Ethics - Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room

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By taking Legal Environment to Business last semester, I had some prior knowledge about Enron before watching this documentary. In this class, we discussed the accounting fraud going on in the company, and we also talked about the enforcement of new rules after the Enron scandal such as The Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This act pretty much was a direct reaction to Enron and a way to stop such misconduct in the business world.

I really enjoyed watching this movie because it was more in depth than what we would have gotten out of a textbook. The narrator and the different people expressing what happened at Enron were very interesting and made some good points throughout the movie. My favorite point was when they talked about Jeffrey Skilling’s employee ranking system. The point made was, “how can a company even be successful if they terminate 15% of their employees on a yearly basis.” I completely agree with this statement, because I believe that to have a successful company you must have happy and satisfied employees and Enron did not have that. Enron had a hostile and competitive workforce with people constantly being fired, which is not good for the company nor is it ethically proper. For the most part, I agreed with everything this documentary had to say and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, the part talking about Lou Pai’s obsession with strippers I didn’t think was very relevant. I just didn’t quite understand why it was put in this movie or what it had to do with the company aspect of Enron. As for questions, I was really interested in learning about what happened to the people in the company that essentially did not do anything wrong and how Enron affected their lives after the scandal unfolded.

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