Although it seems that everybody now has an opinion on the Enron debacle, I still think that the business lessons to be learned have been slighted. In a sense, what has happened with this three-card monte version of a corporation is a reflection of the worst single tendency of the last quarter-century of American business: A reliance on short-term results in order to influence Wall Street. That Enron exploited the weaknesses of this rigid and unrealistic form of measurement and used it to manipulate the market can certainly be seen as poetic justice, but that's hardly consolation to the thousands of employees and investors who were lured into losing their retirement savings.
Unfortunately, there is little chance that Wall Street will change its adoring embrace of short-term numbers anytime soon. That does not mean, however, that we should overlook the management errors behind Enron's collapse. No company, whatever its size or its industry, can afford to ignore these errors, which are as much "character" issues as anything.
Here are what I call "The Enron Rules":