Fall of Big BusinessCONFIDETIALIn this report I will talk about how businesses choose the path of greed instead of choosing the ethical path. Some of the world's largest companies have fallen into this type of thinking, including Worldcom and Enron. But as stated in the article "Business Ethics at Work", huge ethical dilemmas plague the world today, as it is very difficult to mix ethics and profits, as the main goal of many businesses is to make profits for themselves and their shareholders. Also in “Business Ethics at Work,” about 70 percent of managers and human resources experts surveyed worldwide indicated that pressure is the main factor in ethical violations. The second reason is to advance one's career and the third is the desire to protect one's livelihood. So a lot plays into how some companies choose the lower road, particularly when there is pressure to deliver more than a person is capable of or more than they are willing to do, there has a tendency to take shortcuts. We will explore this expression more later. Well, one of the most talked about and most frowned upon companies of our time is Enron (Wall Street, a story from its beginnings to the fall of Enron). Enron was originally a natural gas producing company based in Houston. It expanded into the electric utility market with the acquisition of Portland General Company. This merger was the first of its kind. They then began to become very aggressive in the merger market in the early 1990s. Growth was achieved through acquisition, they used mergers as their primary method of research and development, preferring to acquire the expertise they needed instead than developing it internally. These types of companies are called serial acquirers. They even had a knack for providing their own financial services, hiring their own merger specialist from Wallstreet and employing them rather than paying fees to regular merger firms (companies that negotiate mergers for a fee). The company's strategy is to become one of the most transactional non-investment companies in the world, acquisitions are part of the company's daily life. In a short time, Enron became more of a trading company than a traditional energy supplier. It has become the 7th largest company by assets in the world..