Replying to LO28166 --
Dear Organlearners,
Don Dwiggins <d.l.dwiggins@computer.org> writes:
>Question: which were the primary essentialities that
>were impaired within Enron to allow things to get as
>bad as they did? My "vote" is for spareness and
>otherness:
>Spareness, because they failed to appreciate the limits
>of their ability to cover one bad bet with another;
>Otherness, because they allowed themselves to develop
>an insular state of mind that kept them from being able
>to see the warning signals from an outsider's point of
>view.
Greetings dear Dwig,
Your "because they allowed themselves to develop an insular state of mind
that kept them from being able to see the warning signals from an
outsider's point of view" shows how intricately the 7Es are woven into
each other.
You are indeed thinking of otherness. But I think that it has to do with
sureness because these other viewpoints came from its environment (except
for one brave woman inside Enron). Were they not ignorant to their
context, thinking that their newly found corporate identity gave them the
hat trick? If this was the case, then their sureness rather than their
otherness was primarily impaired.
As for spareness, I agree with you. As a company which dealt primarily
with ("free") energy and its rarity, there should have been enough
corporate memory to have warned them that they are doing "funny
accounting". One cannot generate and sell electricity out of nothing. One
has to buy the fuel and then make a profit in generating electricity and
selling it.
But somehow in the back of my mind I feel that only sureness was primarily
impaired. It caused the impairing of the other 7Es and mostly in
otherness. That is why a muc reduced otherness caused its demise. The sign
of its demise when workers of Enron were encouraged to buy its stocks so
as to share in its earnings. Such inbreeding is for me a sure sign of
impaired sureness causing impaired otherness.
I hope I am wrong and I hope it will not be taken as an offending
judgement when I write the following:-
To claim an identity without making sure of it in its context is
something which I observed among many American companies
and other organisations.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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