cc licensed flickr photo shared by Michael 1952
Many people believe you have to fail before you are able to truly succeed. If that is true, the characters in this list of the top 5 movies about business failure are due for a windfall.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
This film, a documentary, inadvertently tracks the start of the rise to a global crisis in the early 2000s. Everyone has heard the tales of more recent years; however, we often forget about the one that may have started it all. This company was the seventh-largest company in the US. They falsified their numbers to drive up stock prices and to meet shareholder expectations. As the scandal unfolded, 20,000 people were fired, many people committed suicide to evade a jail sentence, and several people disappeared with hundreds of millions of dollars, while thousands of average Americans lost everything when the company filed for bankruptcy.
This Oscar-winning film, a documentary, provides a comprehensive analysis into the cause for the 2008 global financial crisis. Some aspects uncovered are simply affirmations while others are quite shocking. This film uncovers the truths about the corruption at all levels from politicians to academia. Even people creating the regulations fell to the greed of the mighty dollar. This crisis has cost the world, mostly average people rather than the wealthy, $20 trillion. The collapse of the financial industry has lost millions of people their homes, jobs, and livelihoods, and this film captures the truth about it all.
This film is a story of which many of you are all too familiar. As the head of a large corporation is responsible for increasing stock prices, he chooses to lay off the working class rather than to cut his own salary or sell off part of the company. This film is about a company’s failure to protect the best interest of the company rather than their own pockets. They fail to adapt to the current economic conditions and to plan long term. The failures are many, and it is the lives of the every-person which are destroyed rather than the life of the decision maker at fault.
This drama examines the behind-the-scenes events which took place to save Lehman Brothers before the world changed as we know it. You will watch the interactions of many people frantically working to save the US economy before it unfolds. You will see the backroom negotiations and how the whole of Wall Street felt relief, perhaps without feeling any real consequences, with the generous bailout from the government.
This film is a pre-Enron and pre-financial crisis classic which showcases the arrogance, corruption, and disregard for ethics many people in the financial world had at that time. The main characters in this film are brokers for an investment firm with loose morals and little regard for the people they convince to invest in their less-than-idyllic companies. This movie takes you into the lives of the brokers who make thousands and millions off the every-person with blatant disregard and respect for the lives they are ruining for their own financial gain.
Each of these top 5 movies about business failure has a valuable lesson to be learned, in particular to the business students of tomorrow. It is unclear if the businesses of today will learn from these failings; however, one thing is certain; as businesses continue to fail due to colossal errors in judgement, films will continue to be made about them.
Mike Bolger is a business administrator and guest author at Top-Business-Degrees.net, a site with guides and information about getting business degrees online.