A Look at Enron’s Leadership
A Look at Enron’s Leadership
At one time Enron was one of the top businesses in natural gas companies of America. In fact, Enron was number seven on the Fortune 500 in 2001. Lack in leadership, and lack in organizational ethics led to the failure of the Enron Company. Ken Lay, Enron’s Chairman and Chief Executive along with Jeffrey Skilling who briefly served as president and Chief Executive and provided a system for self-enrichment at the expense of employees and shareholders. The leadership style of both Lay and Skilling is discussed of how both these brilliant yet, greedy people to the collapse of one of the biggest natural gas corporation (Epstein, 2005). A comparison look at types of toxic organizational cultures as well as healthy cultures is also discussed.
One of the measures used to determine a leader’s effectiveness is to look at how the organization is performing to attain goals. Performance is measures by net profits, sales increase, profit margin, and return on investments, market shares as well as others. Other measures include subordinate ratings and ratings from peers (Yuki, 2006). The Enron Company formed deceptive partnerships to embellish the finances of the company, and the executives engaged in risky trading securities. Along with the company executives, Enron’s accounting firm led by Arthur Anders destroyed critical documents pertaining to Enron’s finances. The top tier of the organization was corrupted and thus leading to Enron’s failure (Corporate Reform, 2007). Leaders need to identify issues facing corporation, they need to ask questions, which safeguard the interest of shareholder. They are responsible for ensuring the company remains loyal to the purpose to...