Most unfortunately, Enron's plunge into bankruptcy court also cost many of its rank-and-file employees their savings.
At the height of the Enron mania, the company's market value was $65 billion. Once the dust cleared, the final value was $0.
In the business world, we can point to instances when a lack of integrity has bankrupted entire companies - in sectors as different as finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and energy.
I'm sure you're well aware of the car companies that went out of business in 2008. And you've had other brands that have seen difficulties here and there, even some of the most famous ones.
Is there any fairness in a system where a group of people can borrow a bunch of money to buy a company and pay themselves millions of dollars in dividends and fees, while the company itself ends up bankrupt and its employees lose their jobs, health insurance and pensions?
At IBM, if we kept our same leadership for 36 years, we'd be bankrupt.
Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work.
Remember Circuit City? Bear Stearns? Lehman Brothers? Sports Authority? Once, all were billion-dollar companies - then gone in a moment. The fatal problem might be fraud or corruption, but more often, it's simply that management didn't see 'over the other side of the hill.'
If General Motors can't survive and run their business like a business, let them go under.
