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Enron

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Submitted By inakomini
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Dorina Komini
Management 402
September 9, 2015
The Makings and Pitfalls of Successful Qualities
When people think of Enron they most likely don’t burst full of warm fuzzy feeling, they think of rich greedy men who only cared about themselves who were arrogant and thought they could get away with anything because of how much money they had. But what happened at Enron is more than the a sad story in which people lost all their life savings, it is about men who had all the right qualities letting their need for successes overshadow all ethical behavior. The movie Enron: the smartest guys in the room, says that what happened at Enron is perceived as an issue about the numbers but that it in fact is a human tragedy. It’s a tale in which the people at the top of the company are so great at what they do that people they have the whole nation believing in them and continually buying stock. The tragedy is that they weren’t doing it in an ethical manner but even more tragic is the fact that everyone has been thought that the characteristic of Ken Lay, chairmen and CEO at Enron, and Jeff Skilling, COO at Enron, are good qualities to have.
Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were not bad people, in fact they had all the makings of great business men. Lay’s childhood is described as an unpleasantly penniless childhood, but Lay managed to work several jobs as a child wanting a better life for himself. The movie describes Lay as a dreamer of sorts by telling a story of a time he was sitting on a tractor and thinking about all he do could do in business, he was ambitious. Lay considers himself a visionary and when he meets Jeff Skilling he knows he is a man with big ideas, Skilling was an innovator and innovation has always been what’s made a company successful take Steve Jobs with the iPhone, he created something no one thought was ever possible and cornered a markets. Skilling

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