Spring/Summer cleaning at home with Tita Juls

Tita Juls took time off work today. She thought maybe she'd go watch a movie, but decided to wait until next week when Avengers Infinty War opens.

Instead, she did some spring/summer cleaning, and discovered some of her old school papers. One paper in particular was well preserved as she received full marks and was quite proud of herself, and because this was one of the rare moments she actually took school work seriously.

Here is a a qoute of the paper:

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

While watching the film, I remembered the movie "Fun with Dick and Jane." It starred Jim Carrey (as Dick) and Tea Leoni (as Jane) as husband and wife struggling to get by when Dick looses his job when the company he was working for suddenly went bankrupt. The story did not dwell on the story of the company Dick worked for, as it focused mainly in what kind of measures someone would do just to survive, but it was a parody of how Enron went down (there were scenes where the stocks were shown to have gone down in mere seconds, frantic shredding of papers, and their CEO exiting as quick as Mr. Flash via chopper.)

Seeing this film also suddenly made me feel thankful for my job here in the Philippines. It may not br as gigantic and as powerful as Enron had become, but at least I am sure our CEO would never do or let anything like that happen.

The again, who knows? Money IS the root of all evil.

But before I go into morals, I have to say that Enron had Bad Crisis Management. The top people who ran it, Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, believed too much in themselves. They only knew how to go forward and never stop, like a racehorse. Kenneth Lay proved that he had a bad judgement case when he allowed his traders to gamble everything, as long as it was in his orders (which was all the time, really).

Working in a corporate setting has taught me a saying - "A chip off the old block", which generally means that the son or daughter of the CEO or president is working in the company. But I would like to use that saying to describe Jeff Skilling/Kenneth Lay and their traders. As shown in the film, the part where someone was told to electrocute somebody on orders, and if told that it was okay, they would do it, and eventually start to actually enjoy it. So if Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay told their subordinates that it was okay to feel powerful, to be heartless, and act like they ruled the world, then it was considered the norm. There was no room here for sympathy or conscience, only greed and ruthlessness. In this case, Enron traders deliberately caused rolling blackouts in California just so they could increase the price of electricity, and therefore, increase profits.

It was the law for energy commodity trading deregulation that had the major contribution to this diasatrous event. This law left electricity trading "open to manipulation", to which Lay and Skiling took advantage of. Law should never have been passed, because it seems to me that the only reason this happened was for one reason, and that was for Enron to gain the number one spot in electricity trading.

Another thing is that they did not know how to retrace their steps and find out what they could do better. Instead, they just ran blindly and thought only of themselves. All they thought of was escaping. One of them, Cliff Baxter, committed suicide. Jeff Skilling himself resigned only a day before Enron came crashing down. In his own little denial world, he could say to himself, "Hey, I wasn't here when it hapoened, so it's not my fault." But everybody else knows better. He knew what was happening, had the power to stop it, but decided to look on as Enron self-destructed.

The accounting scandal could have been prevented, if at least one of the parties was brave enough to say, "Hey, we can do this, but at some point we're going to have to stop hiding the loses and come clean." But no one did. Who knows if Arthur Andersen knew what Enron was up to and just put up with it, and vice versa. The point is, they knew how to work around it, but didn't do anything to make the "profits" real. Either that, or they didn't have the best accountants working for them.

To me, the biggest mistake of all was Enron's 'breach of public trust'. Their actions affected ALL of their employees, who really believed they landed themselves the best job in the best company in the world. Because of their indesiciveness and cunning, thousands of people were left with virtually nothing. How could Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay sleep at night while knowing all this?

Morals and deadly sins aside, Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay could have worked for real profits instead of pretending they were the richest men on earth (at some point they probably were). Yes, they were smart, but they were too smart for their own good.

Aside from old school papers, Tita Juls also found her old original poems, short stories and thought she might share them here too one of these days.

Note: This was a reflection paper done for school requirements, anything erroneous is entirely my fault.