Word: enronizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Saturday morning in December, TIME brought Coleen Rowley of the FBI, Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Sherron Watkins of Enron together to talk, for the first time, about their parallel experiences over the past year. The women had never met before, but over breakfast they compared stories and marveled at the similarities: their motivations for exposing the flaws of their institutions, their shock at having their secret actions exposed and then condemned in some quarters, and their enduring love for the ideals of their workplaces. They also discovered they shared much in their personal lives, and they enjoyed cheering...
WATKINS: I wouldn't not do it. [But] what I really failed to grasp was the seriousness of the emperor-has-no-clothes phenomenon. I thought leaders were made in moments of crisis, and I naively thought that I would be handing [Enron chairman] Ken Lay his leadership moment. I honestly thought people would step up. But I said he was naked, and when he turned to the ministers around him, they said they were sure he was clothed...
WATKINS: There's a slim chance Enron might not have imploded. It's hard to say. People are much more forgiving than we think. The scary thing is the amount of resistance we met. People I thought were my friends and I thought would support me backed away. They said, "Sherron, you're on your own on this...
WATKINS: It's also the gaming of corporate America. Enron was a love-hate thing. The opportunities I was afforded and the deals I got to do and the places I got to see--on that end, it was just stupendous. Then there are the times when you say, Why can't we do it right? Why do we have to be pushing the accounting envelope...
ROWLEY: I'm not usually focused on business, but when their news broke, I read that and saw some encouragement. The same reason I wrote the letter was the reason for WorldCom and Enron. I thought, Oh, gosh, there's someone doing the right thing...