A True Hero?

Sherron Watkins was an American former Vice President of Corporate Development at the Enron Corporation. She become famous after alerting the company’s executives of finance fraud within the company.

When you have an ethical challenge you life is never the same. You either going to rise to it and try to stop the bad behavior or you’re going to rationalize why you going to stay silent.

Sherron Watkins

I’m questioning Sharron’s “heroic move” because she wrote a 7 pages memo to her boss Ken Lay, and Arthur Andersen, about the “Condor” and “Raptor” partnerships and the accounting and the doom Enron was facing.

This is what she wrote in her memo:

“I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals, my 8 years of Enron work history will be worth nothing on my resume, the business world will consider the past successes as nothing but an elaborate accounting hoax.” Accounting for the failed partnerships, she said, was “a bit like robbing the bank in one year and trying to pay it back 2 years later,” and she just didn’t think it could be done. “We are under too much scrutiny,” she wrote, “and there are probably one or two disgruntled ‘redeployed’ employees who know enough about the ‘funny’ accounting to get us in trouble. Has Enron become a risky place to work? For those of us who didn’t get rich over the last few years, can we afford to stay?”

By Frank Pellegrini

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,194927,00.html

The truth is Watkins never really blew a whistle. A whistle-blower would have written that letter to the Houston Chronicle, and long before August; Watkins wrote it to Ken Lay, and warned him of potential whistle-blowers lurking among them.