Anonymous Question at Company Meeting: Should we invest our entire 401K in Enron stock?
Company Executive: Absolutely! Don't you guys think?
Other Company Executives: [Nods Affirmatively]

Wow, did Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room piss me off. I already knew there was a lot of crap that went on in that company, but I didn't quite realize how much of a ponzi scheme the whole thing was.

Before I get sidetracked ranting about the corporation in general, I feel I should talk about how the movie is as a movie. I think it was good, but not great. I think my core issue is the movie had thesis statement problems. They had a baseline thesis: this company was strong on gree, short on morals, and setup in a way that checks and balances failed - causing lots of problems. But they don't really stick to it. They stray and hint at other things all the time. The talk about the Bush family relationship with Enron. They talk about low level workers who got screwed. They talk about how Enron manipulated the California energy market. It had the feel to me of a scenario where the filmmakers had enough evidence to clearly say something, but wanted to say more, they just couldn't back it all up. They clearly said the things the could back up (that thesis statement) and then hinted at all the other stuff. This kind of hinting doesn't sit well with me, because it sets off my propaganda sniffer.

It was a good movie, and very interesting, but I'm not sure if it was deserving of it's Best Documentary Oscar nomination. There are better documentaries out there, but not many that will anger you like this one (which, I suppose, makes it an effective documentary.)

Now I'll move on to my rants about the company. Oddly enough, they suffer from a lot of the same things that the movie does. They're just not that focused. I have lots of things I'm pissed about, and lots of thoughts related to all that, but there's no ovarall theme to them.

The focus on the stock price in the company is a big one. This is a company that was ruled by the stock price. It's almost like that was their primary purpose as a business - make the stock go up. The executives preached it, and it was the mantra all the way down. Interestingly enough, that's not only why the company failed (more on this in a bit) but why it failed so spectacularly. The company had been living a lie for years, claiming untrue things and bullying people to keep the stock price going up. It was the immense wealth made possible by this growth that incentivised both Enron, and all their checks and balances, to do the ridiculous things they did. Eventually the world caught up with them and the house of cards came crashing down.

We heard a lot of stories as Enron callapsed about regular blue collar employees who's retirements were destroyed by the whole thing (plenty of white collar people got screwed too, but they aren't as attractive to news crews.) I had sympathy for these people, but at the same time they were playing a risky business. They had a major investment (their retirement funds) that was not only homogenious, but invested entirely in their employer. This is bad. You should diversify major investments, and in general, not have them be tied to your employer (this adds resiliency to your finances.) Instead these people chose to take part in the gold rush, and got screwed.

Sure, the executives did bad things. But this was still clearly risky behavior, even if everything had been on the level. And it bugs me when people claim these people didn't know any better, as if due to their simplistic blue collar ways they aren't capable of understanding basic finances (that always seemed elitist and insulting.) But then I saw the movie, and I saw the Enron executives clearly tell people it was a good idea to invest their entire 401K account in Enron stock. This is ridiculous advice, especially coming from an Enron executive to an Enron employee. But I understand how an employee might trust it and be inclined to follow it. Of all the despicable things I saw in this movie, that one line angered me the most.

Overall a company like Enron is doomed to fail. They don't produce anything. As a company they don't add value any where. Their entire business plan involved trading energy. They didn't create energy. They didn't do something to the energy market to make it more efficient. They just bought and sold it. They didn't add value to the process.

People ocassionaly give me a hard time about where I work. We're called the evil empire and it seems like a good chunk of the world thinks we make crappy software (news flash: making software is hard! Have you used much that wasn't written by Microsoft? A lot of it is crap.) But the one things I know is I add value. I'm involved in producing something that I know people will appreciate.

This is incredibly important to me. I couldn't work at a place like Enron. I'd wonder what I was actually doing, what I was making better.

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