[Laura I Appleman has our first movie review]
On Sunday evening I went to see the movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is based on the book of the same name.
Seeing the movie after following the Enron disaster over the past few years was fascinating (and highly recommended!), and unsurprisingly brought up a whole host of ethics questions, legal and otherwise.
As wiser commentators than I have noted--including the authors and filmmakers-- the collapse of Enron was in large part due to HUBRIS. Everyone involved in the Enron scandal was guilty of hubris and self-aggrandizement: not only the leaders and traders who worked at Enron, but also Enron’s consulting firm, McKinsey, its accountant, Arthur Andersen, the banks that helped fund it (Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, etc.) and of course Enron’s law firm, Vinson & Elkins.
Lawyers, of course, are frequently guilty of hubris. Who among us has not thought that she was the "smartest person in the room," and acted accordingly? It is hubris and its cousin, willful blindness to reality, which have caused some of the greatest scandals of our time. With Watergate, with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, with Martha Stewart, to take three prominent examples, all of the actors involved were convinced that they were the smartest and the best, and thus they could get away with it.
One wonders if our system of education, legal and otherwise, contributes to this ethical lacunae. Intelligence, not moral clarity, is rewarded in the classroom, whether that classroom is in college, law school, business school or medical school. As professionals, we need to start thinking about how we value and reward human qualities. If we continue to privilege smarts over social conscience, we are likely to have another Enron, in some form or another.
The collapse of Enron left so much misery in its wake, from the loss of workers’ life savings to the suicide of Cliff Baxter. How many more wake-up calls do we need to begin re-evaluating our priorities?