After news of the scandal of Enron, one of the hottest items on e-Bay was a 64-page copy of Enron’s corporate code of ethics. One seller/former employee proclaimed it had “never been opened.” In the forward Kenneth L. Lay, CEO of Enron stated, “We want to be proud of Enron and to know that it enjoys a reputation for fairness and honesty and that it is respected (Enron 2).” For a company with such an extensive code of ethics and a CEO who seemed to want the company to be respected for that, there are still so many unanswered questions of what exactly went wrong. I believe that simply having a solid and thorough code of ethics alone does not prevent a company from acting unethically when given the right opportunity. Investors and the media once considered Enron to be the company of the future. The company had detailed code of ethics and powerful front men like Kenneth Lay, who is the son of a Baptist minister and whose own son was studying to enter the ministry (Flynt 1). Unfortunately the Enron board waived the company’s own ethic code requirements to allow the company’s Chief Financial Officer to serve as a general partner for the partnership that Enron was using as a conduit for much of its business. They also allowed discrepancies of millions of dollars. It was not until whistleblower Sherron S. Watkins stepped forward that the deceit began to unravel. Enron finally declared bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, leaving employees with out jobs or money. For a company to be successful ethically, it must go beyond the notion of simple legal compliance and adopt a values-based organizational culture. A corporate code of ethics can be a very valuable and integral part of a company’s culture but I believe that it is not strong enough to stand alone. Thought and care must go into constructing the code of ethics and the implementation of it. Companies need to infuse ethics and integrity throughout their corporate culture as well as into their definition of success. To be successfully ethical, companies must go beyond the notion of simple legal compliance and adopt a values-based organizational culture. Creating a Solid Code of Ethics What a Code of Ethics Should Entail The importance of having a code of ethics is to define acceptable behaviors and promote higher standards of practice within a company. The code should provide a benchmark for... ... middle of paper ... ...y’s code but to our own code. We must make the choice of what is right and wrong and if put in a situation that is against our code we must stand up for what is right. A corporate code of ethics is a necessity in today’s society, but the company cannot simply rely on just a code. For the code to be successful, the company must prove to their employees that they have the desire and drive to back the words of their code. Bibliography Enron. Code of Ethics. Jul. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005. . Flynt, Sean. “Enron Whistleblower Tells Chilling Tale of Corporate Ruin.” Samford University. Ed. Donna Fitch. 19 Feb. 2004. 3 Mar. 2005. . Hawkins, John. “The Path to Ethical Internalization: Moving the Code from the Wall to Daily Life.” Leadership Lifestyle. May. 2003 Johnson & Johnson. Our Credo. 18 August 2004. 3 Mar. 2005. . Wee, Heesun. “Corporate Ethics: Right Makes Might.” Business Week Online. Ed. Douglas Harbrecht. 11 Apr. 2002. 3 Mar. 2005. United States of America. One Hundred Seventh Congress. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Sec 406. Brooks, Leonard J. Business & Professional Ethics for Directors, Executives, & Accountants. Mason: Thompson South-Western, 2004. p227.
The ethical code of an organization illustrates the importance of being honest, acting with integrity, and showing fairness in decision making (Bethel, 2015). Ultimately, “laws regulating business conduct are passed because some stakeholders believe they cannot be trusted to do what is right” (Ferrell, Fraedrich, & Ferrell, 2015, p. 95). In the last couple of years, culture has become the initiator for compliance, which means from the top down there has to be a commitment to act in a way that represents the company’s core values (Verschoor, 2015).
Ethics policies are implemented in almost all businesses. Companies search for candidates that will be moral in their actions so they can ensure long-term financial success. Throughout history we have seen businesses fall due to unethical behavior. In recent years the business Enron Corporation is best known for the scandal that led to the bankruptcy of a company with more than 60 billion dollars in assets. We will examine the circumstances that led to the downfall of Enron, how the scandal was realized, as well as the outcome of one of the largest bankruptcies in American history; a case that exemplifies unethical professional behavior.
Trevino, L., & Nelson, K. (2011). Managing business ethics - straight talk about how to
Seawell, Buie 2010, ‘The Content and Practice of Business Ethics’, Good Business, pp. 2-18, viewed 22 October 2013, .
An organization needs to adhere to ethics in order to effectively implement its mission, vision, and objectives in a way in which offers a solid foundation to management and their subordinates to properly develop and implement its strategies. By doing so, the organization as a whole is essentially subscribing to one commonality that directs all of the actions of the employees of the organization. Additionally, it assists in preventing such employees from divergence in regard to the proposed strategic guideline. Ethics additionally ensures that a strategic plan is developed in accordance to the interests of the appropriate stakeholders of the organization, both internal and external (Jin & Drozdenko, 2010). Likewise, corporate governance that stems from various regulatory parties makes it necessary for organizations to maintain a high degree of ethical standards; this is done by incorporating ethics within the organization’s strategic plan so as to foster a positive corporate image for the stakeholders and general public (Min-Dong Paul, 2009).
Verschoor, CMA, Curtis C. "Ethics: Do The Right Thing." Strategic Finance (2006). Retrieved on 18 September 2006 .
To provide an example of a breach of ethical conduct in the workplace, we may remember the case of a financial manager in a corporation that decided not to pay overtime to some employees. After a deep outside investigation, the company was summoned with thousands of dollars to remedy the payment that was supposed to be paid to all employees who worked more than forty hours per week. Again, it is needed more than just a booklet stating that the company adheres to the code of business ethics. It is needed serious managers that can run the company with the most seriousness as possible. Consequently, any written codes of business ethics, regardless of how well it has been crafted, need people that adhere to its internal content with a serious desire to do the right thing.
Enron Corporation was based in Houston, Texas and participated in the wholesale exchange of American energy and commodities (ex. electricity and natural gas). Enron found itself in the middle of a very public accounting fraud scandal in the early 2000s. The corruption of Enron’s CFO and top executives bring to question their ethics and ethical culture of the company. Additionally, examining Enron ethics, their organization culture, will help to determine how their criminal acts could have been prevented.
When an ethical dilemma arises within an organization, it is difficult to separate right and wrong with what is best for the majority. Sometimes the answer is not a simple “yes” or “no.” In 2002, Enron Corporation shows us just that. By 2002, the sixth-largest corporation in America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The case of the Enron scandal is one of the best examples of corporate greed and fraud in America.
“When a company called Enron… ascends to the number seven spot on the Fortune 500 and then collapses in weeks into a smoking ruin, its stock worth pennies, its CEO, a confidante of presidents, more or less evaporated, there must be lessons in there somewhere.” - Daniel Henninger.
Nowadays, society is governed by the implications of rules and legal restrictions. All of these rules were created to uphold and maintain the idea of ethical and moral values. Even children growing up were taught by some very important codes of ethics at school. These lessons learned as a youth growing up carry over into adulthood, as an employee or manager. Managers and workers both follow a similar code of ethics within the work place. Today, as a management consultant, I am going to prepare a code of ethics for my clients as they have recently started a restaurant called Knox, it is important to have a code of ethics in every company for their employees and also a circular by explaining the purpose and benefits of a good ethics. And finally, a brief report on the steps of strategic formulation and implementation.
Enron was on the of the most successful and innovative companies throughout the 1990s. In October of 2001, Enron admitted that its income had been vastly overstated; and its equity value was actually a couple of billion dollars less than was stated on its income statement (The Fall of Enron, 2016). Enron was forced to declare bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. The primary reasons behind the scandal at Enron was the negligence of Enron’s auditing group Arthur Andersen who helped the company to continually perpetrate the fraud (The Fall of Enron, 2016). The Enron collapse had a huge effect on present accounting regulations and rules.
Kidder, R, M., (2010), Center for corporate Ethics, Institute for Global Ethics, retrieved on August 08,2010 from www.globalethics.org/ reserve reading from ethics news line
The Enron Corporation was an American energy company that provided natural gas, electricity, and communications to its customers both wholesale and retail globally and in the northwestern United States (Ferrell, et al, 2013). Top executives, prestigious law firms, trusted accounting firms, the largest banks in the finance industry, the board of directors, and other high powered people, all played a part in the biggest most popular scandal that shook the faith of the American people in big business and the stock market with the demise of one of the top Fortune 500 companies that made billions of dollars through illegal and unethical gains (Ferrell, et al, 2013). Many shareholders, employees, and investors lost their entire life savings, investments,
In the aftermath of Enron, Washington Mutual Bank, TYCO, and World Comm these companies went against the grain of what good ethical behavior is and what their respective company’s code of ethics were. The criminal justice system has made it clear that it will not allow companies and their executives to get away with the misuse of public trust by allowing them to make themselves rich at the expense of the employee. Where these crimes are both ethically and morally wrong, the CEO’s of major corporations are being punished by a ...