Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling) – It changed corporate America forever.  Enron, the energy giant hardly known outside the energy industry five years ago, became a household name when its executives created a Ponzi Scheme that, amazingly, fooled all of the analysts, all of the business press, and a whole lot of investors and its own employees.  Possessed by the driving need to show quarterly profits, top executives Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andy Fastow concocted one of the most creative – and ultimately illegal — accounting schemes to ensure impressive, if illusionary, earnings. Watching this highly-regarded documentary, you can’t help but be impressed with the conviction of the conspirators.  When all was said and done, Enron was bankrupt, its employees’ 401(k)s were gone, the nation’s oldest accounting and auditing firm was gone, and the President of the United States was tainted.  It all happened because of hubris and ego.  But it will long stand for how corporate America can become so obsessed with profit that all logic disappears.