Titans of the industry are sometimes built upon a solid foundation. For Enron, they have been built around loopholes, not within the scope of the law to pump their value by posting unrealized gains based on projected profits. Today, they are well known and are synonymous with the epitome of greed and corruption. Their collapse sent shockwaves throughout society, some people whose retirement funds were invested in Enron collapsed leaving them in limbo.

The greed within the enterprise was systematic from top-down. The culture within Enron was that of misconduct and deceit, wherein instead of reprimanded, they were rewarded. The justification is that it is okay as long as they have earned money for Enron, Ethical practices were not present at all within the corporate culture. In simple terms, the motto of Enron it is ok to cheat as long as you earn money or you do not get caught.

The demise of Enron started when time has caught up with them. The mountain of cooked accounting books, wherein they had posted unrealized gains on top of each other has piled up too much, that their subsidiaries one after another could no longer support their cooked earnings, suddenly reporting massive losses. This has in turn led to an SEC investigation that now led to the bankruptcy and downfall of Enron.

It was learned in the SEC investigations that in order to prop their earnings up and meet their financial targets, Enron manipulated electricity prices in California, by artificially starving the region of electricity supply. This in turn has caused blackouts in California affecting everyone, even hospitals.

Today, in response to Enron, rules, and regulations have been improved to prevent the manipulation of responsible disclosures and have been effective in policing bad actors in their attempts to deceive and manipulate would-be investors.

A similar deception I know of happened here in the Philippines in 2017. Calata Corporation and its CEO, Joseph Calata, attempted to deceive investors by stating that it had secured permits to be able to start a casino in Cebu, but in reality, he deceived the people because the permits are non-existent. Due to his blatant deception, the price of the shares of his company increased considerably. Then upon the public knowledge that his claim was false, the Philippines Stock Exchange had delisted his company and his person was banned from trading.

The Lasallian educators clearly understand that the ground roots of the problem. Most of the perpetrators in these scenarios lacked education in ethics., the solution to these problems of greed could be lessened through the breeding of business leaders that are knowledgeable in ethics. As a future Lasallian business leader, I believe that an enterprise should be responsible for its disclosures and not rely on deception to gain profit. If I in the future will be running a publicly listed corporation I believe that being deceptive in disclosures only assures that the enterprise will fail in the future, being honest on the other hand protects the corporation and its reputation.