I just finished reading a history of Enron’s downfall, The Smartest Guys in the
Room, which hereby wins my award for “Least Appropriate Book Title.”

An unsurprising feature of Enron’s slow rot and abrupt collapse was that the
executive players never admitted to having made a large mistake. When
catastrophe #247 grew to such an extent that it required an actual policy
change, they would say, “Too bad that didn’t work out—it was such a good
idea—how are we going to hide the problem on our balance sheet?” As opposed to,
“It now seems obvious in retrospect that it was a mistake from the beginning.”
As opposed to, “I’ve been stupid.” There was never a watershed moment, a moment
of humbling realization, of acknowledging a fundamental problem. After the
bankruptcy, Jeff Skilling, the former COO and brief CEO of Enron, declined his
own lawyers’ advice to take the Fifth Amendment; he testified before Congress
that Enron had been a great company.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily…