According to to Reich, many of the top corporate executives in the 1980’s based their management strategies on “paper Entrepreneurism”. By this Reich meant that most of the innovations made by corporate executives in this era constituted paper manipulations other than the institutional and technological innovations. They aimed at manipulating financial statements in favor of their firms, litigations, tax avoidance, mergers and acquisitions in order to create a good name to the investors by portraying a fake picture. According to Reich, the American industry is damaged by the inability of the American professionals to accommodate institutional changes for flexible production and complex organizational management (Robert, 1983).
As the top executives of the Enron during their time in office, Skilling and Lay were the perpetrators of deceit. They allowed their juniors to get involved in corrupt and other ethical corrupt activities at the expense of the investors. Both Skilling and Lay participated in cheating the company’s investors by giving false financial reports and yet their company was making losses (Salter, 2008). Since they were the top leaders of Enron the rest of the employees followed their actions and a culture of deceit was created at Enron. The reason why Skilling and Lay created a culture of deceit at Enron was because they wanted to steal from the company and by making deceit as the culture of the company they were able to implement their personal evil motives under its umbrella.
It is true that in the fraud schemes at Enron in 1990s, deception in one area paved way for others. The most interesting and confusing thing about the fraud cases at Enron is how one department in the company could realize that the information given by the other department was false and yet continue to work on it thereby making more frauds. It is unclear how, the fraud activities of the top executives of the company were able to get continue misleading stealing from the company without being noticed by their juniors. This clearly shows that a culture of deceit was actually created at the Enron Company and the top executives are not the only to blame for the loss made by the company. In my personal view, I think it was important to investigate all the senior employees of Enron during the time of the fraud. All the staff members of Enron required some lesson on how to uphold business ethics.