Week 3 of this class focused on Relationships and Values and doing the assignment was a real eye opener for me. I was forced to go through all of the emotions and feelings, both personally and professionally, as a result of the Enron scandal. Our assignment was to watch a video documentary called, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, as well as read an article called, "Enron Scandal At-a-Glance." We were required to write an essay examining Enron from the perspective of the Seven Layers of Integrity,and choose which layers seemed most important to the case and which layers were less important. We also were required to include a visual aid in our essay that related to what we wrote about.
I must say that after I watched the video and read several articles about this scandal, I was outraged all over again-- this time more angry though, which I know came out in my writing of the essay. Even after almost 10 years since the Enron Scandal took place, I found myself still getting emotional and upset over it. So this was kind of like "therapy" for me to express myself and write about it in this class.
You see, at the time of the Enron scandal, I was employed as a manager at the Chicago headquarters of Arthur Andersen and had worked there for almost 10 years. Andersen was Enron's auditor and the Firm was convicted on March 15, 2001 for obstructing justice relating to the Enron case. As a result of this conviction, Andersen was forced to close their doors and 29,000 employees lost their jobs, including mine.
I was devastated when this happened and could not believe it, because Arthur Andersen was a great company to work for and, from my perspective, was all about being professional and having a code of ethics to follow and was very proud to work for one of the Big Four accounting firms in the world.
When you work so hard to accomplish and achieve your personal and professinal goals and something like this happens that you have no control over, it does affect you deeply and can change your life forever. One thing that I learned from all of this, is that you can never take anything for granted or think that you will never change your career path, especially if you love your job, because one day you have it and the next day it could be gone. The Enron-Arthur Arthursen case will go down in history- like the sinking of the Titanic!
Bye for now-
Laurie
