Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 9:25 AM by Gene

Speaking of business ethics, this bit in a BizWeek column about corporate America's secret savior didn't strike us until today:

Ken Lay, the disgraced former CEO of Enron who died July 5 at age 64, leaves a legacy of shame. His mismanagement and dishonesty brought down a giant corporation, he was ultimately responsible for destroying thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in employees' savings and shareholders' wealth, and he was found criminally guilty of massive fraud.

Perversely, there's also a remarkably positive aspect to his legacy. In the post-Lay, post-Enron era, corporations are behaving a lot better. Lay's terrible example of how not to run a large corporation helped fundamentally reform U.S. companies' standards of leadership, governance, and accountability.

Yes, a lot of the improvement is the result of more intense government oversight—the kind of regulation and enforcement Enron always railed against and which should have been in place so a debacle like Enron was not allowed to happen.

Yes, indeed. But for the fear of the law and appearing politically incorrect to news hacks nothing would hold back big biz. That's the damnable thing: we cannot expect businessmen to be moral ON THEIR OWN. The question is certainly not if the next Ken Lay will appear, it's WHEN.