Skiling's Enron

1. How could Enron have collapsed so dramatically, once being listed as the seventh largest corporation? It is a mix of illegal and unethical top leadership catastrophe, a corporate culture that supported unethical behavior, no concern for utilitarianism and support from the investment banking community. Enron lacked the characteristics of virtue ethics trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship. The other ethics such as do no harm, keep your promises, tell the truth no matter what it costs, watching out for ethical egoism and the use of self-interests under business ethics and do not use people as a means to an end are few more that we need to keep in mind. The root to illegal behavior I believe started with exploitation of de-regularized policies towards oil and electricity. Enron never stopped to think of what they were doing was unethical.

Five Ethical issues:

401k: Enron executives, including Skilling and Lay, were fully aware of the company's financial trouble; this information was hidden by the earning reports. The average employee had 62 percent of his or her 401K tied up in Enron stock. 21,000 employees of Enron lost their jobs, and medical insurance. In year 2001, employees lost $1.2 billion in retirement funds, overall retirees lost $2 billion in pension funds.  

Stock freezing: When the stock was collapsing the top executives sold millions of stock to innocent investors, making personal wealth by the collapse. At this time employees were prevented from selling their own stock that was held in their 401K retirement plans.    

California: Generating blackouts on purpose, scamming California regardless of its situation. They were trying to cash any opportunity they could find being evil. Milgram experiment, top leadership instructing employees (traders) to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience, encouraging inconsiderateness of traders during California fires (“burn baby burn”), betting on the...