Part I: The Era of the Story, the Shtick, the Celebrity
The focus was centered on marketing the image, not only of the company, but of its senior executives. It was an approach that met with widespread success and was emulated throughout corporate America.
"This was the era of the story, the shtick, the celebrity," said James Post, a professor of management at Boston University.
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," Kurt Eichenwald, New York Times, May 26, 2006.
"Our corporate culture became narcissistic; we were focused on our image, not our customers or our products."
--"Ken Lay Still Isn't Listening," Sherron Watkins, Time magazine, June 5, 2006. (Sherron Watkins was a Time Person of the Year in 2002, after it was revealed that she had warned Lay in a memo about its faulty accounting practices. She tells her story in the book, Power Failure: the Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron.)
Recently, I read an angry op-ed that accused the Republican voters of falling for a "cult of personality" when they put an inept and even dangerous president into office.
The truth is that George W. Bush never owned a Texas ranch in his life until he decided to buy one right before he ran for president in 2000. Emulating his hero, Ronald Reagan, there were soon many photo-ops of him clearing brush on his place and driving around in a pickup truck with various heads of state. He liked to use colorful cowboy language, like how we would catch Bin Laden dead or alive.
It was said that in the election of 2004, Bush won because if you were to ask people who they'd most like to have a beer with, they overwhelmingly chose Bush over Kerry.
Trouble is, the guy you have a beer with is usually a lousy choice to run the government of the United States of America.
But his cowboy hats and his swagger and his deliberate choice to mispronounce words like "nuclear"--as if he didn't have a master's degree from Harvard--was all about image.
That whole MISSION ACCOMPLISHED debacle was a Karl Rove wet dream from the day they first started talking about invading Iraq. Sweep in, throw the bum out in a couple months, hang around a few weeks so the Iraqis could take over the smooth functioning of their government, and get out of Dodge just in time for the 2002 mid-term elections!
Why, it was a stroke of genius, that flight suit. It worked, too. Who knows how many times that footage and that photo-op was published and republished. They even made an action-figure doll of Bush in his flight suit.
Very sexy. Very in-charge.
While Iraq, waaaay off in the background, on the other side of the world from that aircraft carrier, was exploding into chaos, confusion, and corpses.
Corporate executives…read market delusions as proof of their own genius. Arrogance gave way to recklessness, which in turn opened the door to criminality.
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," Kurt Eichenwald, New York Times, May 26, 2006.
As stock prices continued to rise even as Enron was building its books on air, the head honchos in the board room kept high-fiving each other for the fact that the stocks were going up, even though they knew full well that it was all illusion. In fact, over time, they began to be convinced that they were invincible.
And so it has been in the White House. The more times Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld insist that all is well in Iraq, the more they believe it, in spite of stark evidence to the contrary.
And even as that evidence has mounted, this administration has a harder and harder time admitting their own mistakes. So far, all Bush can think of is that he maybe shouldn't have said, Bring it on, to the insurgency.
And now, those C-130's just keep bringin' it on…all those flag-draped caskets.
And wasn't Mike Brown doing a heckuva job down there in New Orleans?
"As time went on, Jeff (Skilling) had a harder and harder time admitting that things were wrong…I have to believe that, when the lights went out at night, he knew what was coming."
--documentary, "Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room," comment from a former vice-president of the company.
The trial underscores that neither defendant fully accepted what happened at the company…Mr. Lay testified that the collapse was largely caused by…critical articles in the Wall Street Journal, and the resulting panic in the marketplace…
Mr. Lay's argument was a bit like blaming a match for igniting a basement filled with gasoline.
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," Kurt Eichenwald, New York Times, May 26, 2006.
"As I watched Lay after the verdict, I was deeply dismayed by his inability to discern truth…he refuses to take responsibility. He hides behind words of scripture, but even these he misses."
--"Ken Lay Still Isn't Listening," Sherron Watkins, Time Magazine, June 5, 2006.
After the disgraceful debacle on the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina, administration officials launched a vigorous campaign aimed at blaming state and local--read, Democrat--officials for the colossal failures of FEMA.
After Joseph Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed piece calling into question the administration's flawed rationale for starting a war, the administration launched a vicious smear campaign against him that, among other things, revealed his wife's top-secret clearance as a CIA operative.
After the Pulitzer Prize-winning series of Washington Post articles came out, exposing the deplorable practice of scooping up, apparently, most any Muslim they thought might be a terrorist even if they had no evidence of same, throwing them into secret airplanes and shipping them off to prisons located in foreign countries which allowed torture--criminal charges have been threatened gainst the reporter of the articles and the suspected CIA leak was fired. All other CIA employees have undergone a series of humiliating lie detector tests to make sure they root out anybody else who might be inclined to reveal illegal things this government is doing.
When top-ranking military generals tried to speak truth to power during the arrogant rush-up to war, they were marginalized, silenced, and eventually, forced out into early retirement.
The list is far too long to go into in any exhausting detail, but the constant ongoing refusal of this administration to listen to reason or admit mistakes has led to thousands and thousands of unnecessary deaths.
An executive of the company's investor relations group testified her fear of correcting Mr. Skilling when he made what she considered to be false statements to investors….Mr. Skilling became increasingly difficult to contradict…"
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," New York Times
And if that were all there was to it, the CEO's of big corporations and big governments ignoring bad news and refusing to face reality, that would be bad enough. But in both of these parallel cases, it's worse.
Far worse.
"We're on the side of the angels."
--Jeff Skilling
"Stay the course, and everything will turn out all right."
--Ken Lay
Both of these quotes were captured on video. They had been made to packed auditoriums filled with Enron employees, and later shown in the documentary, Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room. And in both instances, the company was already riddled with corruption and doomed to destruction within months.
And yes, Ken Lay really said, STAY THE COURSE AND EVERYTHING WILL TURN OUT ALL RIGHT.
Sound familiar?
"The business is doing GREAT. The worst is over."
--Ken Lay, on August 14, 2001. Two months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy.
"Like America, we're under attack."
Ken Lay on September 11, 2001, one month away from collapse. On the day of this nation's most horrific terrorist attack, he was using it as an excuse to blame the media for Enron's problems.
"We're stronger than ever."
--Ken Lay, on October 23, 2001. At the very moment he was making these remarks to his nervous employees, encouraging them not to sell their stocks, he had already sold tens of millions of dollars of his own, and right then, across town, Arthur Andersen, the venerable accounting firm who'd handled Enron's books…was busy shredding more than ONE TON of paper related to Enron.
By the time Ken Lay was being hauled away in handcuffs, he was blaming everybody else for his crimes--including the Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow.
"I cannot take responsibility for what Fastow did."
--Ken Lay
The problem with refusing to accept responsibility for crimes or even for mistakes and failures is that it's part of the entire culture of, We're not doing anything wrong.
As long as a CEO or a president continues to believe that, no matter what, they're not doing anything wrong, then they will continue to push the boundaries of outrage.
"Enron should not be viewed as an aberration, something that can't happen anywhere else, because it's all about the rationalization that you're not doing anything wrong…It's a fusion of responsibility. Everybody was on the bandwagon. It can happen again."
--documentary, "Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room," quote by Sherron Watkins, former executive vice-president of Enron and whistle-blower.
"This was the era of the story, the shtick, the celebrity," said James Post, a professor of management at Boston University.
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," Kurt Eichenwald, New York Times, May 26, 2006.
"Our corporate culture became narcissistic; we were focused on our image, not our customers or our products."
--"Ken Lay Still Isn't Listening," Sherron Watkins, Time magazine, June 5, 2006. (Sherron Watkins was a Time Person of the Year in 2002, after it was revealed that she had warned Lay in a memo about its faulty accounting practices. She tells her story in the book, Power Failure: the Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron.)
Recently, I read an angry op-ed that accused the Republican voters of falling for a "cult of personality" when they put an inept and even dangerous president into office.
The truth is that George W. Bush never owned a Texas ranch in his life until he decided to buy one right before he ran for president in 2000. Emulating his hero, Ronald Reagan, there were soon many photo-ops of him clearing brush on his place and driving around in a pickup truck with various heads of state. He liked to use colorful cowboy language, like how we would catch Bin Laden dead or alive.
It was said that in the election of 2004, Bush won because if you were to ask people who they'd most like to have a beer with, they overwhelmingly chose Bush over Kerry.
Trouble is, the guy you have a beer with is usually a lousy choice to run the government of the United States of America.
But his cowboy hats and his swagger and his deliberate choice to mispronounce words like "nuclear"--as if he didn't have a master's degree from Harvard--was all about image.
That whole MISSION ACCOMPLISHED debacle was a Karl Rove wet dream from the day they first started talking about invading Iraq. Sweep in, throw the bum out in a couple months, hang around a few weeks so the Iraqis could take over the smooth functioning of their government, and get out of Dodge just in time for the 2002 mid-term elections!
Why, it was a stroke of genius, that flight suit. It worked, too. Who knows how many times that footage and that photo-op was published and republished. They even made an action-figure doll of Bush in his flight suit.
Very sexy. Very in-charge.
While Iraq, waaaay off in the background, on the other side of the world from that aircraft carrier, was exploding into chaos, confusion, and corpses.
Corporate executives…read market delusions as proof of their own genius. Arrogance gave way to recklessness, which in turn opened the door to criminality.
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," Kurt Eichenwald, New York Times, May 26, 2006.
As stock prices continued to rise even as Enron was building its books on air, the head honchos in the board room kept high-fiving each other for the fact that the stocks were going up, even though they knew full well that it was all illusion. In fact, over time, they began to be convinced that they were invincible.
And so it has been in the White House. The more times Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld insist that all is well in Iraq, the more they believe it, in spite of stark evidence to the contrary.
And even as that evidence has mounted, this administration has a harder and harder time admitting their own mistakes. So far, all Bush can think of is that he maybe shouldn't have said, Bring it on, to the insurgency.
And now, those C-130's just keep bringin' it on…all those flag-draped caskets.
And wasn't Mike Brown doing a heckuva job down there in New Orleans?
"As time went on, Jeff (Skilling) had a harder and harder time admitting that things were wrong…I have to believe that, when the lights went out at night, he knew what was coming."
--documentary, "Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room," comment from a former vice-president of the company.
The trial underscores that neither defendant fully accepted what happened at the company…Mr. Lay testified that the collapse was largely caused by…critical articles in the Wall Street Journal, and the resulting panic in the marketplace…
Mr. Lay's argument was a bit like blaming a match for igniting a basement filled with gasoline.
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," Kurt Eichenwald, New York Times, May 26, 2006.
"As I watched Lay after the verdict, I was deeply dismayed by his inability to discern truth…he refuses to take responsibility. He hides behind words of scripture, but even these he misses."
--"Ken Lay Still Isn't Listening," Sherron Watkins, Time Magazine, June 5, 2006.
After the disgraceful debacle on the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina, administration officials launched a vigorous campaign aimed at blaming state and local--read, Democrat--officials for the colossal failures of FEMA.
After Joseph Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed piece calling into question the administration's flawed rationale for starting a war, the administration launched a vicious smear campaign against him that, among other things, revealed his wife's top-secret clearance as a CIA operative.
After the Pulitzer Prize-winning series of Washington Post articles came out, exposing the deplorable practice of scooping up, apparently, most any Muslim they thought might be a terrorist even if they had no evidence of same, throwing them into secret airplanes and shipping them off to prisons located in foreign countries which allowed torture--criminal charges have been threatened gainst the reporter of the articles and the suspected CIA leak was fired. All other CIA employees have undergone a series of humiliating lie detector tests to make sure they root out anybody else who might be inclined to reveal illegal things this government is doing.
When top-ranking military generals tried to speak truth to power during the arrogant rush-up to war, they were marginalized, silenced, and eventually, forced out into early retirement.
The list is far too long to go into in any exhausting detail, but the constant ongoing refusal of this administration to listen to reason or admit mistakes has led to thousands and thousands of unnecessary deaths.
An executive of the company's investor relations group testified her fear of correcting Mr. Skilling when he made what she considered to be false statements to investors….Mr. Skilling became increasingly difficult to contradict…"
--"In Enron Case, a Verdict on an Era," New York Times
And if that were all there was to it, the CEO's of big corporations and big governments ignoring bad news and refusing to face reality, that would be bad enough. But in both of these parallel cases, it's worse.
Far worse.
"We're on the side of the angels."
--Jeff Skilling
"Stay the course, and everything will turn out all right."
--Ken Lay
Both of these quotes were captured on video. They had been made to packed auditoriums filled with Enron employees, and later shown in the documentary, Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room. And in both instances, the company was already riddled with corruption and doomed to destruction within months.
And yes, Ken Lay really said, STAY THE COURSE AND EVERYTHING WILL TURN OUT ALL RIGHT.
Sound familiar?
"The business is doing GREAT. The worst is over."
--Ken Lay, on August 14, 2001. Two months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy.
"Like America, we're under attack."
Ken Lay on September 11, 2001, one month away from collapse. On the day of this nation's most horrific terrorist attack, he was using it as an excuse to blame the media for Enron's problems.
"We're stronger than ever."
--Ken Lay, on October 23, 2001. At the very moment he was making these remarks to his nervous employees, encouraging them not to sell their stocks, he had already sold tens of millions of dollars of his own, and right then, across town, Arthur Andersen, the venerable accounting firm who'd handled Enron's books…was busy shredding more than ONE TON of paper related to Enron.
By the time Ken Lay was being hauled away in handcuffs, he was blaming everybody else for his crimes--including the Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow.
"I cannot take responsibility for what Fastow did."
--Ken Lay
The problem with refusing to accept responsibility for crimes or even for mistakes and failures is that it's part of the entire culture of, We're not doing anything wrong.
As long as a CEO or a president continues to believe that, no matter what, they're not doing anything wrong, then they will continue to push the boundaries of outrage.
"Enron should not be viewed as an aberration, something that can't happen anywhere else, because it's all about the rationalization that you're not doing anything wrong…It's a fusion of responsibility. Everybody was on the bandwagon. It can happen again."
--documentary, "Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room," quote by Sherron Watkins, former executive vice-president of Enron and whistle-blower.
posted by Deanie Mills at 7:01 AM
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