Enron Greed Quotes

In my world, people are always plotting. You have no idea of all the crimes people in business commit every day. Like it was nothing. Or there’s a set of special rules for them. Remember when Bush made that whole speech about ‘corporate ethics’ last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or WorldCom is an aberration? It’s only the tip. Business is a religion. Probably the only one practiced all over the world.

Greed is a snarling monster with a set of razor-sharp teeth on both sides of its head. It devours not only those from whom it takes, but also those who eagerly receive its plunder.

The tale of Enron is a story of human weakness, of hubris and greed and rampant self-delusion; of ambition run amok; of a grand experiment in the deregulated world; of a business model that didn’t work; and of smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster—and who couldn’t admit they were wrong.

They believed that the market was the ultimate judge of their work and their worth. The market created a true meritocracy: you either made money because you made good trading decisions or you lost money because you made bad ones. Enron traders didn't concern themselves with ethics or morality apart from the unyielding judgment of the markets. Maximizing profit was not inconsistent with doing good, they believed, but an inherent part of it, and the judge of good and bad was the immediate consequence of a split-second trade. The highest compliment a trader could pay a colleague was to call him intellectually pure. The worst insult was to accuse someone of making a deal that wasn't economic.

Seven months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy. The golden goose of corporate capitalism collapsed amid charges of ‘greed, bribery, corruption, deceit, parasitism, speculation, insider trading, scams, nepotism, tax avoidance, environmental destruction, human rights abuses, exploitation, theft of workers’ entitlements, job losses, use of state machinery against workers and Indigenous peoples, cosy relationships with government, and monopoly manipulation of prices and markets’.

Take “Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence,” which was Enron’s motto. If execs at Enron had decided to replace those concepts with something different—perhaps Greed, Greed, Lust for Money, and Greed—it might have drawn a few chuckles but otherwise there would have been no impact. On the other hand, one of Google’s stated values has always been to “Focus on the User.” If we changed that, perhaps by putting the needs of advertisers or publishing partners first, our inboxes would be flooded, and outraged engineers would take over the weekly, company-wide TGIF meeting (which is hosted by Larry and Sergey, and where employees are welcome to—and often do—voice their disagreement with company decisions). Employees always have a choice, so belie your values at your own risk.

Which offers up the problem: no company can prosper over the long term if every employee is a free agent, motivated solely by greed, no matter how smart he is. No company can function if it only hires brilliant MBAs - and sets them against each other. There is a reason companies value team players, just as there's a reason that people who get along with others tend to do well in corporate life. The reason is simple: you can't build a company on brilliance alone. You need people who can come up with ideas, and you also need people who can implement those ideas and are well compensated for doing so.

Like other primates, humans can be described either as highly cooperative animals that need to work hard to keep selfish and aggressive urges under control or as highly competitive animals that nevertheless have the ability to get along and engage in give-and-take. This is what makes socially positive tendencies so interesting: They play out against a backdrop of competition. I rate humans among the most aggressive of primates but also believe that we’re masters at connecting and that social ties constrain competition. In other words, we are by no means obligatorily aggressive. It’s all a matter of balance: Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naïve and detrimental, whereas unconstrained greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog world that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its own mean-spirited weight.

I didn’t set out to commit a crime. I certainly didn’t set out to hurt anyone. When I was working at Enron, you know, I was kind of a hero, because I helped the company make its numbers every quarter. And I thought I was doing a good thing. I thought I was smart... but I wasn’t. I wake up every morning, and I take out my prison ID card, which I have with me here today. And it makes certain that I remember all the people. I remember that I harmed so many people in what I did. It encourages me to try to do the little things that I can to make amends for what I did.