Enron Business Ethics

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Pages: 9

Corporations are all around us these days. No matter whether one is buying a pair of shoes or a new laptop, whether he is looking for a soft drink or some kind of sport equipment, one has to choose among the options offered by the supermarket, the shopping center, or the website where all these are available. No matter whether one lives in the USA, in China, or in Bulgaria, he or she can still buy one and the same items from one and the same brands. The globalization is now on a whole new level and those international brands are fighting on one and the same market. And all they want is the approval of the people who will buy their goods and services only. And to win this approval the companies now need to be ethical, because once you sell someone …show more content…
The fall of Enron, which was one of the biggest energy companies in America, was reviewed by Paul Healy, the James R. Williston Professor of Business Administration at Harvard, and Krisha G. Palepu, the Ross Graham Walker Professor of Business Administration at Harvard, who state that “despite the elaborate corporate governance network, Enron was able to attract large sums of capital to fund questionable business model, conceal its true performance through a series of accounting and financing maneuvers, and hype its stock to unsustainable levels” (2). This problem with Enron’s management led to the decrease of their public image by both the public and investors. The public didn’t want to be supplied by them and increased the demand for other energy companies, investors stopped to invest in the firm, leading to the crash of Enron in both the stock and bond market, eventually leading to its bankruptcy. This example of non-ethical practices by a huge corporation shows that despite the gigantic revenues of $111 billion dollars, a company can be totally shattered by ignoring the ethical standards and speculating with the public. Since its fall, Enron has become a warning sign for many big corporations for the importance of following corporate social responsibility. An utterly different corporation in terms of business ethics, the Royal Dutch Shell Plc, one of the biggest petroleum companies in the world, presents a totally different aspect. In the research “The Relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Profitability: The Case of Royal Dutch Shell Plc”, Ekatah Innocent, Logistics Manager at Midax Logistics, bases its measurement of corporate social responsibility on the content analysis of the annual reports of Royal Dutch Shell Plc.