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extend your brand.
    These examples of disconnections may sound minor or temporary, but when left unattended, they can really hurt a company. In fact, in the worst-case scenario, they can literally destroy a business.
    That’s how I see what happened at Arthur Andersen and Enron.
    Arthur Andersen was founded almost a century ago with the mission to become the most respected and trusted auditing firm in the world. It was a company that prided itself on having the courage to say no, even if that meant losing a client. It succeeded by hiring the most capable, highest-integrity CPAs and rewarding them for doing work that rightfully earned the confidence of corporations and regulators around the world.
    Then the boom times of the 1980s arrived, and Arthur Andersen decided it wanted to start a consulting business; that’s where the excitement was, not to mention the big money. The company started hiring more MBAs and paying them the constantly escalating salaries that the consulting industry demanded. In 1989, the firm actually split into two divisions, a traditional accounting division, called Arthur Andersen, and Andersen Consulting. Both fell under one corporate umbrella, called Andersen Worldwide.
    Rather than valuing conscientiousness, consulting firms generally encourage creativity and reward aggressive sales behavior, taking the customer from one project to the next. In the 1990s in particular, there was a real cowboy mentality in the consulting industry, and the accounting side of Andersen felt the impact. Some of its accountants clearly got swept up in the momentum, letting go of the auditing business values that had guided them for so long.
    Throughout most of the ’90s, Arthur Andersen was a firm at war with itself. The consulting business was subsidizing the auditing side and didn’t like it, and you can be sure the auditing side wasn’t crazy about the bravado of the consulting types. In these circumstances, how could people know the answer to questions like, “What really is our mission?” “What values matter most?” and “How should we behave?” Depending on which side of the firm you pledged allegiance to, your answer would be different, and that’s ultimately why the partners ended up in court with each other, trying to figure out how to divide the firm’s profits.
    Eventually, in 2002, the house collapsed, due in no small part to the disconnect between its mission and values.
    In many ways, the same kind of dynamic was behind the Enron collapse.
    In its prior life, Enron was a simple, rather mundane pipeline and energy company. Everyone was focused on getting gas from point A to point B cheaply and quickly, a mission they accomplished very well by having expertise in energy sourcing and distribution.
    Then, like Arthur Andersen, the company changed missions. Someone got the idea to turn Enron into a trading company. Again, the goal was faster growth.
    At Arthur Andersen, auditors wearing green eyeshades were suddenly sharing office space with MBAs in Armani suits. At Enron—again, figuratively speaking—the guys in coveralls were suddenly riding the elevator with MBAs in suspenders.
    Enron’s new mission meant it focused first on trading energy and then on trading anything and everything. That change was probably pretty exciting at the time, but obviously no one stopped to figure out and explicitly broadcast what values and corresponding behaviors would support such a heady goal. The trading desk was the place to be, and the pipeline and energy generation businesses got shoved to the background. Unfortunately, there were no processes to provide checks and balances for the suspenders crowd. And it was in that context— of no context —that Enron’s collapse occurred.
    Like Arthur Andersen’s, this story of a mission and values disconnect ends with thousands of innocent people losing their jobs. What a tragedy.
     
     
     
    This chapter opened with the observation that people in business talk a