Survival of the Ethically Fittest: Drawing Industry Implications about the Importance of Business Ethics in Strategic Planning Based on the Enron Case

Due to numerous widely publicized corporate scandals, including the Enron accounting affair, matters revolving around ethical conduct in business have gradually been gaining importance in recent years. Furthermore, as a matter of fact, corporate strategy shapes businesses to the most outreaching degree. As a result of the prevalence of business ethics in some of the most essential elements of strategy, it is evident that understanding the mutually reinforcing interdependency between these two disciplines is crucial in order to achieve sustainable strategic success. The purpose of the study in hand was to examine what type of influence there is between a properly established code of ethics and strategic planning, to investigate whether a failure to develop a general spirit of ethics in business has the potential to contribute to strategic planning failure and more specifically to probe if that was the case at the US American energy tycoon Enron Corporation. The empirical analysis of the qualitative investigations revealed that a well established ethical credo is indeed beneficial to strategic success and a lack of moral business spirit can contribute to strategic planning failure. Nevertheless the experts interviewed concluded that the failure to develop a spirit of ethics within Enron was not a main contributor to the corporate scandal and the subsequent bankruptcy.