as told to Eve Tahmincioglu:

Enron made me very angry. We are all paying a tremendous price for the screw-up.

These are powerful positions we executives hold. I have $8 billion at my disposal. We don’t have that many checks and balances on us. You can lose perspective and start to think you’re royalty. I think of these guys with their $10,000 shower curtains and I say to myself: “I could understand how they could do that.” But I also understand why you shouldn’t.

If you lose track of where you came from – and surprisingly, a lot of these people came from humble beginnings – you lose track of your moral compass, what work means to the average employee.

Davis’s Wisconsin based Alliant Energy has been in some hot water over investments in Brazil and a Mexican resort. Interesting to see this in the NY Times. I wonder if this piece was “placed” by a pr firm?