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Think of it as a huge public Wall Street confessional. Lots of companies, willingly or unwillingly, are going to be making public confessions about how they have sold their souls. Big companies who yesterday wouldn’t let you and I walk
on their carpet are going to confess. Even smaller “Mom and
Pop” businesses will examine themselves to ensure that their
practices will bear moral scrutiny. What else is “sin” but a violation
of a high moral standard? What we are seeing are sins of deception
on debt and
earnings declarations. The sin of putting profitability over product
safety. The sin of paying huge bonuses to inept leaders while workers
continue to lose. The sin of putting shareholder value ahead of
doing what is right and of making the world a better place. Chief among sinners right now, it appears,
is the leadership of Enron. Are you caught up in this whole thing?
Probably to most
of us it is a distant happening. It wasn’t our employer.
We didn’t have our money in Enron’s 401k. None of those
zillionare executives invited us to a party at their mansions.
Yet we are not as distant from occurrences like this as we may
think. The whole story of Enron’s sins is immensely sad. Sad because
thousands of people have been betrayed. Sad because Enron’s
former vice-chairman J. Clifford Baxter shot himself because he “could
not take the pain,” leaving a wife and two children to make
sense of it all. He was only 43. He had a brand new 2002 Mercedes
the papers were careful to point out, as though the kind of car
you take your own life in is important. May God grant his family
unusual courage and peace. I can’t follow the unfolding Enron story without recalling
an ancient teaching along the lines of: “What does it profit
someone if they sell all their shares based on insider knowledge,
accumulating extra-ordinary wealth at the expense of others, and
lose their soul in doing so?” (Well it goes something like
that.) Now it seems to me that once you sell your
soul, you can’t
buy it back. There is not some grand universal Pawn Shop in the
sky. You sell it, it’s gone. You can pay a fine, settle a
lawsuit and even build a park in the middle of the city – but
that doesn’t mean you get your soul back. You get it back
only if you confess and come clean before God, man and the marketplace. Obviously, I am no Enron expert – apparently
no one is. But it seems to me that this company went to a great
deal of trouble
to sell its soul. According to various news sources, they set up
between 900 and 2,000 different ventures to conceal billions in
debt. We have here a sin of commission if there ever was one. Ian Percy is a business speaker, author. Reach him at www.ianperc.com
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Confession: the Latest in Corporate Strategies 3 Most Important Performance Questions 7 Signs That Your Company is Selling Its Soul It's Not the Place, It's the Purpose 360° Evaluations Will Take You In Circles It's All About the Customer, Stupid I Once Was Blind But Now I See Organizing A Conference, 3 Principles Might Help Balancing Your Spiritual Center Three Guidelines For A life-Changing Conference Looking for the "Best Practice" May Not Be The Best Practice Get
a Life! Principles For Making The Most Out of Long Drawn-Out and Difficult Experiences If You Don't Quit Re-Engineering, You'll Go Blind What's All This Stuff About Spirituality in the Workplace? Does Your Company Have a Soul? Does Your Corporate Vision Make You Tremble? Get Irritated and Change the World On the Issue of Change
- Get a Grip!
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