Experiencing Enron at "Ground Zero" A Tragedy as Great as Robbing Employees of Their Retirement: Stripping Them of Their Honesty and Integrity

By K. Jack Speer Employees Left to Pay for Enron's Debt K. Jack Speer President The Delta Associates Comparing Enron to the destruction of the World Trade Center is not a good comparison in most ways. Nobody directly died the day Enron declared bankruptcy. BizWatchOnline’s parent company, The Delta Associates, lost "only" $12,000 and six figures worth of booked business, which would have only been an irritation in years prior to 2001. Our plight pales against that of others. There was the new Enron employee who was just hired and relocated from Dallas and who is stuck with a $30,000 moving bill. Another employee will be trying for a long time to pay a $9,000 American Express expense account bill. Others have lost their homes and their retirements. A colleague of ours is owed $6 million on a pipeline construction project—he may lose the business he worked a lifetime to build before he is able to collect enough from garnished production on the pipeline to return to solvency. Enron's Tragic Stories Never End

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One ground zero comparison that does ring true is that the stories are endless, and to paraphrase the words of Rudolph Giuliani, are "more than any of us can bear."

Enron is, nonetheless, a kind of "ground zero" for corporate America. It destroyed more lives and enterprises than any business event I have seen during my lifetime. Enron was no respecter of persons. From Laura Bush’s mother, who lost over $8,000 to the Houston Ballet where Enron’s $15,000 contribution check for the holiday production of The Nutcracker bounced, a spirit of mistrust and delusion has settled in that will not be quickly dispelled.

Ken Lay,  Former CEO who left  Enron Corp at the request of creditors

How Enron Co-opted Their Employees and Made Them Mouthpieces for Lies But I want to talk about the very lowest thing that Enron senior management did—they robbed their employees of their integrity and turned them into liars. The employees never even knew what was happening to them. It was as if you could pickpocket integrity from a person just as a skilled thief can lift a wallet. Enron’s employees were assuring vendors and creditors with all of their sincerity that there was zero chance of their not getting paid. They could say with conviction that those who sold to Enron were in no danger of losing their business.

BizWatch has a bias for senior management. They pilot the ships that create wealth and employment in America. While others were doing the painful work in 2001 of cutting expenses and laying off employees to save their companies, Enron executives created a sense that all was well by continuing to spend and hire. So the lie went down the food chain.