Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room

Yesterday we saw a very good new documentary called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The movie is based on the well reviewed book of the same name, written by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.

The film tells the story of Enron as a story that's less about the intricate numbers games used by the company to manipulate it's stock price, and more about the people at the center of it all. It's a story about power and its influence over people. In one startling scene, we're shown footage of a psychology study called The Milgram Experiment in which a test subject is coerced by a scientist into repeatedly shocking another man (actually an actor) as part of an experiment. Despite the fact that the test subject knows what he is doing is wrong, he continues to do it just because the scientists tells him it's okay to do so. The same sort of pyschology allowed Enron employees to continue to work in an environment where many people knew something was fishy, but were willing to believe that someone in a position authority would surely prevent anything from going wrong. It's unbelievably ironic that Enron's company motto was 'Ask Why' when it was the lack of the ability to ask this very question that ended up being their undoing.

If you've followed the Enron case at all closely, there's not a lot in the movie that will come as a shock, but the film does a good job of tying together a lot of information into a format that's entertaining and very watchable. Heck, they even manage to work in a gratuitous stripper scene and a clip from The Simpsons!

You can watch a trailer on-line here.