Weren't we all a little Enron-ish?
Maybe not all of us. But lots of people I know. Or maybe it was just me.
The Enron trial resumes today (check out this Houston Chronicle site for everything you ever wanted to know about the case). At issue is whether officials in the company's Internet division continued to make optimistic public statements about company performance even though they knew it was falling apart.
While I don't have a lot of sympathy for Skilling and company, it does strike me that pretty much everyone who was ever involved in an Internet company did the same thing. We knew it was all going to hell, but we tried to hold on for as long as we could. And, as a manager at a late-90's tech start-up company, I certainly put on a not-quite-honest happy face for my employees every day. And I always wondered how my boss, the CEO, managed to keep himself quite so positive. (Probably the Christian soft rock he listened to in the car. But that's another story.)
Anyway, it seems like kind of a slippery slope to go after managers for putting a positive spin on how a business is doing.
What's next? Fact-checking the State of the Union?
