The Psychology of Kenneth Lay

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Kenneth Lay was the CEO and Chairman of a successful energy trading company called Enron. Kenneth Lay was born April-15-1942 (Johnson, 2004). His company was widely known to have the most innovated accounting procedures. Kenneth Lay grew up as son to a religious Baptist family. Kenneth Lay is also an educated man; his highest academic achievement is a Ph.D in economics. Kenneth Lay also served the U.S Navy for around 3 years. Kenneth was brought up knowing that he had to always provide for his family. Kenneth Lay married a woman named Linda and in total they have five children. Kenneth Lay was once seen as a “Good Man” due to his charity commitments and his dedication to the minority communities. However In today’s society Kenneth Lay is more known to be one of the biggest conspirators of the globally known pension wipe out and Freud scandal. Kenneth Lay was at the height of his career in April 2001, when Fortune magazine had claimed Enron to be the seventh largest company in the United States (G.Velasquez, 2006). However Kenneth Lay’s journey of success had a terrible downfall six month later when his company filed for bankruptcy December 2, 2001 (G.Velasquez, 2006). The claim of Enron’s bankruptcy is considered to be one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S history. Throughout Kenneth Lay’s trial he still claimed that he did nothing wrong and he had no part of what happened to his company and turn the blame on Andrew Fastrow. Down the line Kenneth Lay’s company was convicted for wiping out, $60 million in market values, 56 hundred jobs, and hundreds of employee’s life savings. Kenneth Lay claimed that Fastrow was the one behind the entire operation of the pension wipe out. Furthermore there are m... ... middle of paper ... ...and Andrew Fastrow was placing small amount of money (also known as entities) into accounts with unusual names such as Jedi and Chewco. By disguising theses account they were never entered into the data systems (Velasquez, 2009). Therefore the money laundering scheme would not be easily discovered making the punishment unlikely and the reward higher and of more value. Furthermore since Kenneth was covering up the losses of the company and making investors and employees believe that the company was making profit instead drastically loosing. Kenneth knew that his investors and employees trusted him. And as long as he made it seem that the company was on the right path no one would become suspicious or question him. Therefore this allowed him to pick his target very well and plan out his entire scheme perfectly as those who fall into rational choice theory do.

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