The film also offers insight into some of the unsubstantiated rumors that have been whispered since the energy giant's collapse. Those who think this couldn't happen again are naïve. It provides a detailed autopsy of what happened (without becoming so technical that everyone except the lawyers and accountants in the audience become lost) and it warns against the culture of "synergistic corruption" that has infiltrated all of corporate America.
And it's not fiction.Įnron: The Smartest Guys in the Room does two things exceptionally well. This is Glengarry Glen Ross on a larger scale. From the boardrooms to the stockrooms, survival of the fittest means only those who raise the EBIT keep their jobs and get their bonuses. There's only one word that means anything to the CEOs, COOs, and CFOs of major companies, and it's not "ethics." Instead, "greed" is the mantra by which they live and work - get rich quick and damn the consequences (and the people crushed underfoot during the stampede to grab the money). Today, Corporate America may pay lip-service to the term "ethics," but the men and women at the top don't understand or care about the definition. What were your main takeaways? What did it leave you wondering? Send us a note at We’ll feature the reactions in our next newsletter.Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is truly a tale for our time. We’d love to hear your feedback on the documentary. “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is available with a library card or university login on Kanopy and for rent for a small fee on various streaming platforms. What has not changed is the danger of companies focussing their work on keeping their daily and quarterly stock prices high on the theory that, without that, nothing else matters much. The collapse ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people in its orbit. The law, financial regulation and so much else changed after Enron went bust (search the term “Sarbanes-Oxley”). Federal regulators share blame, given that the Securities and Exchange Commission approved Enron’s preferred system of accounting that allowed the firm to count lots of wishful thinking as real dollars. Banks fed the monster and pension funds, perhaps unwittingly, and helped Enron do the fancy accounting footwork that made its profits look bigger than they were and its debts much, much smaller. This included Enron’s “independent” accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, which itself went out of business in a flurry of shredded documents. This featured analysts who were content to urge investors to keep buying Enron stock even though many had little understanding of the company’s internal workings. Of those, perhaps most important is about the ornate financial ecosystem in which Enron’s big accounting lie flourished.
Enron the smartest guys in the room movie full#
The story is full of lessons about economics and our financial system. Enron, which had been the darling of investors and the analysts that guide them, spectacularly unraveled 20 years ago this month. Skilling did his time Lay died before he could. The film was completed before former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and former Chairman and CEO Ken Lay were each convicted and sentenced to prison. “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”’ earned an Oscar nomination for director Alex Gibney in 2006.
I am sure she would have been aghast at the story of a company with a culture that had turned sociopathic. That is how we referred to my paternal grandmother, Carmela. A trader is on tape sharing his colleague’s joy in their pillaging of the innocents, responding “Yeah, Grandma Millie, man.” The thing is, I literally had a Grandma Millie. Blackouts ensued and the price spikes cost California $30 billion. I need to start by disclosing that I am not inclined to adore a firm that employed people who made fun of “Grandma Millie.” As our documentary this month mentions, a trader for the energy goliath Enron was caught on tape complaining to another that California was trying to claw back “all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers.” This is a reference to Enron’s aggressive manipulation of California’s partially deregulated energy market more than 20 years ago.
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