The smartest guys in the room

I am about to date myself. I distinctly remember the fall of Enron; not because I was a teenager paying attention to the news, but as an adult, more than a decade out of school. It was a huge event. When I saw a copy of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, I picked it up nostalgically.

The authors detail the Enron story with its lead players much like the characters in a Shakespearean tragedy. The protagonists suffer from hubris that brings about their ultimate demise. They blindly followed their greed and allowed their brilliance- yes, these were seriously smart guys- to skirt the edges of legality, often falling off the edge, but obscuring it with confidence and financial maleficence.

What I found interesting is this. The outsiders who profited from the deal were traders who read the reports that were being published, realized they did not make sense, and guessed that the gobble-dee-gook was about hiding the true state of affairs. The big lesson for us today is that we need to be informed and not be cowed into accepting answers that do not actually answer the question. We let our politicians not answer questions all the time and much of the time it is because they do not want to state unpleasant truths. We would be better off if we were willing to swallow bitter pills and not shoot the messenger so long as we had the facts- not alternative facts- just the facts. As educators, it is part of our civic duty to teach this. We need to teach a quest for the truth and a facing of reality. When we make a bad decision, we need to face the music not kick it down the road. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be a part of our national character. We should work to make it so.