ABSTRACT
Enron’s bankruptcy in 2001 was the largest in US corporate history, until the demise of Lehmans in 2008. 2 Barely a year earlier, Enron had declared its intention to become ‘the world’s leading company’. At that stage, by some measures of turnover, it was the seventh largest company in the USA and was at one point valued at US$70 billion by the stock exchange. Its huge ambition on the eve of disaster thus had some credibility. But its subsequent demise ensures instead that its fate is to become one of the most analysed case studies of failure in business history. Enron, essentially, is now ‘a representative anecdote … for corporate greed and corruption’ (Turnage 2010 : 2).
