One of the key areas that a critical thinker can evaluate a company is how effective it is at living up to its mission statement.  The premise, of course, is that the mission statement is worthwhile.  A mission statement is a reflection of the values of the company and is supposed to help guide the goals they pursue.  In ENRON’s case, as documented in the film, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”, neither was true.  The mission statement focused on subjective concerns of respect, integrity, communication, and excellence, and on how they were going to treat each other.  The goals were apparently to make everyone like them.

There are many articles on the internet that one can read on all the problems that led to the collapse of ENRON (and even counterpoints).  To me however, the reality of the overall issue is that they actually followed an unwritten cultural mission statement inferred:  “We will make gobs of money at any cost regardless of ethics.”  The rest was just window dressing.  Internal Traders, employees, investors, and virtually everyone else involved seemed to be perfectly content with the lack of transparency as long as the dollars kept rolling in.

I believe that in order to be effective, a company should formulate a mission statement that establishes a clear, measurable, and attainable goal that can be easily understood and assimilated by the members of the company from top to bottom.  SMART goals should be used by all companies to formulate these mission statements, then checked and reported against the goals regularly to ensure they are on track and not headed for disaster.

The Enron debacle probably would not have been averted using SMART goals, but it might have given investors and employees a common ground to start from.

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