Feb 22
From “(Mis)Using Numbers in the Enron Story” by David Boje, Carolyn Gardner, and William Smith
We are looking at the process of using theatre to persuade others that the constructed numbers reflect the “real” situation of the firm. For example, once each year from 1998 through 2001, an elaborate theatre stage was constructed on Enron’s sixth floor to simulate a real trading floor:
According to former Enron employees, on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown headquarters was a set, designed to trick analysts into believing business was booming… former employee Carol Elkin said that it was all an act, and that no trades were actually made there. The people on the phones were talking to each other.
Enron’s theatre was expensive, $500 to set up each desk, more for phones in this stage-crafted spectacle, and more for the 36-inch flat panel screens and teleconference conference rooms. On this imitation Hollywood stage, the entire set was wired by computer technicians who fed fake statistics to the big screens. On the big day, several hundred employees, including secretaries, played their rehearsed character roles, pretending to be “energy services” traders doing megadeals. Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay played their starring role in the Enron dramatis personae to a target audience of invited Wall Street analysts, who cannot tell real from fake.
Crazy beans.