It is undoubtedly that most people or organizations place their interest before those people they serve in society. However, the need for good governance and accountability should surpass the individual interests at any position of leadership. Lack of adequate governance and accountability in most cases leads to unethical and illegal practices that end up burnishing the name of a leader and the entire corporate organization. The recent examples of accounting scams in different organizations such as Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, and other organizations such as Tyco , Freddie mac and Satyam scandal all point to greed, poor governance, and lack of accountability in leadership.
A lesson from the accounting scams is that good governance entails integrity and ethical practices at the leadership position. In most of these organizations, for instance, it was the leaders who were the masterminds of the scams. At Enron, it was CEO Jeff Skilling, at world com, it was the CEO Bernie Ebbers, and at Tyco, it was the CEO Dennis Kozlowski ( Bhaskar& Flower, 2019). It implies that these leaders did not exhibit integrity and ethical mindset at their position of leadership, and this led to the scandals. Another lesson is that transparency is the root of accountability in the leadership position. Most of these cases involved stealing money or changing the figures to deceive the public on the organization's performance. There was a lack of transparency and accountability for the top leaders, and this led to the scams ( Evans, Flores & Larson, 2019). The last lesson is that poor governance and lack of proper accountability has negative consequences. In these cases, the results were bankruptcy and imprisonment.
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I understand, from these incidences, that I need to be ethically right, transparent, and accountable for all decisions I make unless I want to end up in prison. From a business point of view, these incidences caution that poor governance and lack of accountability are significant obstacles to business success.
References
Bhaskar, K., & Flower, J. (2019). Financial Failures and Scandals: From Enron to Carillion . Routledge.
Evans, K., Flores, S., & Larson, A. M. (2019). Participatory monitoring in forest communities to improve governance, accountability, and women's participation. Small-scale Forestry , 18 (2), 165-187.
