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A Movie Review about "Enron: The smartest guys in the room."
The film titled "Enron: The smartest guys in the room" is a 2005 American
documentary directed by Alex Gibney. It was a movie adaptation based on the book
written by Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind titled "The Smartest Guys in the Room:
The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron," published in the year 2003. This
documentary is based on actual events on the Enron corporation exposing its flawed
and fraudulent business methods and how they contributed to its demise. It traces the
intricate elements of the century's corporate criminality, which eventually brought
down the country's seventh-largest business operation. In this tale, Peter Coyote
provides the narration about greed, arrogance, ethical wrongdoing, and power plays
as Enron evolved from a natural gas pipeline firm to a multinational conglomerate.
Alex Gibney uses news footage, company audio, and videotapes, a comedic sketch
performed in front of employees, C-Span clips, and other sources to provide us with a
wealth of information on their leadership style.
The film suggests that it was a con game from the beginning. According to
Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, it was "the world's best energy corporation." They
must have known when they made that claim that the company was insolvent had
been worthless for years, and had inflated its profits and concealed its losses through
bookkeeping procedures so dishonest that the venerable Arthur Anderson accounting
firm was wiped out the aftermath. Enron generated good quarterly returns out of thin
air to keep its stock price up. "Mark to market" was a term used to describe one
accounting technique. Skilling appears in a sketch mocking "HFV" accounting, which
he defines as "Hypothetical Future Value." Employees had no idea that was essentially
what the corporation was depending on. One Enron strategy was to set up false
offshore company shells and transfer losses to those businesses, which were off the
books. We have been given a schematic image depicting the movement of debt to
such Enron firms. Two of the companies are called "M. Smart" and "M. Yass."
The most surprising revelation in the film is that Enron consciously and
ruthlessly engineered the bogus California energy crisis. In California, there was never
a scarcity of electricity. The film chillingly overhears Enron traders on the phone with
California power plants, instructing plant managers to "be a little creative" in shutting
down plants for "repairs." Enron shut down between 30 and 50 percent of California's
energy industry most of the time, up to 76 percent at one point, while driving up
electricity costs ninefold. We hear Enron traders joking about "Grandma Millie," a
fictitious victim of the rolling blackouts, and bragging about how much money they
made for Enron. As the company falls bankrupt, 20,000 employees are laid off. Their
pensions have been depleted, and their stock is worthless. The primary victims are
widows and orphans. In Portland, a power company lineman who has worked for the
same utility his whole career says his retirement fund was worth $248,000 before
Enron bought the utility and robbed it, placing its retirement assets in Enron stock. He
claims that his retirement savings are now worth around $1,200. Oddly, there hasn't
been more outrage over the Enron scandals. The cost was immeasurable, not just in
terms of lives lost during the power outage but also in terms of money: the state of
California is suing for $6 billion in reimbursements for energy overcharges earned
during the bogus outage. Despite this, the catastrophe, which was made possible by
deregulation fostered by Enron's lobbyists, is still being blamed on "too much
regulation." Enron corporation needed more oversight.
"Enron: The smartest guys in the room" depicts a human tragedy as it shows
the unimaginable behaviors of people driven by greed. It was not just all about
numbers. It was also about the people tricked by the corporation owned by persons
who only think about stocks doing everything they can to make it higher and famous
on wall street. With these traits, we should not assume that the company or firm will
always be on top yet expect it will eventually lead to its downfall. Several people
thought it was due to political concerns that the company with his political campaign
supported George Bush, but it was more of a business concern. Given that the
corporation shredded its reports, around 20,000 employees had lost their jobs and that
$2 billion in pension and requirement funds had been redirected and gone.
A corporation that follows the fundamental principles of excellent corporate
governance, such as fairness, accountability, responsibility, and openness, will
typically outperform others and attract investors whose backing can assist finance
future expansion. The strong culture may have contributed to the scandal's avoidance.
This type of blunder would never have occurred in a culture that valued honesty,
integrity, and ethics as core values. Kenneth's ethical management could have
prevented the scandal. Managers and CEOs are the driving forces behind the
implementation of ethics. This predicament may have been avoided if Kenneth Lay
had established a solid corporate culture based on ethics and instilled ethical ideals in
each corporation's employee. Better ethical oversight and firmer management from
the CEO were required. Skilling should have informed Kenneth Lay about the
company's current condition. Kenneth Lay relied on Skilling to manage the company's
partnerships, but Skilling inflated revenues and wrongly concealed debts. Enron could
have avoided this embarrassment if an adequate company code of conduct had been
in place and was effectively implemented.
There should have been a mechanism to monitor the operations of accounting
companies such as Arthur Andersen, which accepted Enron's illegal partnerships by
acting as both an 'auditor' and a 'consultant' to Enron. These two types of businesses
should not have been permitted to coexist in the same accounting company since their
competing interests drive them to engage in such behavior. If so, such financial firms
that exploited corporate clients and investors should have faced a penalty or fee. The
situation may have been avoided if proper disclosures, accountability, and
transparency had been implemented. Enron owed it to its partners and stockholders
to be fair and honest. Suppose the partnerships were dropped or deleted from the
financial statements. In that case, the shareholders might have been notified in the
notes to the financial statements or made some memorandum entries for the
partnerships.
Furthermore, Enron should have disclosed the trustworthy earnings and profit
data to their partners rather than the inflated ones. Again, there should have been a
system or some restrictions in place to alert market authorities to the sophisticated
accounting procedures that firms may use to conceal losses from investors and claim
unrealized profits. And unethical accounting tactics that could allow the debt to go
unnoticed. Another crucial aspect of the Enron incident is aligning employees'
aspirations with those of the business. One of the most outrageous examples of Enron
employees prioritizing and favoring their interests over stockholders' and
stakeholders'.
A person studying accounting or a person part of the corporate world and a firm
must ensure that they will possess integrity, be ethical, have good governance, and
be careful to take risks. It should be thought of countless times before deciding as it
would affect the owners or stockholders and the employees or stakeholders of the
company and the economy. We shouldn't be driven by greed because we want to have
more money and be well-known in the industry. We should think about our image and
be the person with principles and trustworthiness.