Interesting post by Tom Peters:

The tawdry behavior of Skilling and Lay, and Fannie May execs (revealed in gory detail last week), is inexcusable.

But ...

Legal—as well as illegal—forms of such behaviors are likely to persist, and perhaps increase, as we experience the full-bore arrival of an economy whose basis is almost entirely intangibles. Just as the intellectual property lawyers will be driving Maseratis for the foreseeable future, all of us in enterprise will be wrestling with value-valuations in a world where the great economies have banked their coke ovens, scrapped their material goods—and come to depend on biotech scientists, programmers, experience providers (think Nike, Starbucks—yes Nike, which several years ago Fortune declared a service company, not a manufacturer), and the like.

New rules are needed for new games—and the shakedown cruise will be long and at times painful. (Think about Microsoft's continuing tribulations, now centered on the European Union, and the RIM-Blackberry patent dispute.)

I don't know about the need for "new rules" -- let's not forget that Skilling and Lay were found guilty under the rules in place before Sarbanes-Oxley became law.  I believe that even with current regulations, a debacle like Enron could be repeated -- let's not forget that no less than 16 executives and traders went down in this conspiracy, plus their "independent" accountant and four executives of one of their banks.  I think the only thing SOX ensures is that the CEO will have signed each financial report indicating that they know the contents, so Mr. Lay would no longer be able to claim he didn't know what was going on.

Maybe he's not talking about new regulation, but new rules to govern ourselves -- but what would those be?  Don't invest in companies if you can't understand the accounting transactions?  Practice skepticism if the valuation of a company sounds too good to be true?  Those sound like old rules to me.

Tags: valuation, market, regulation, Enron, corporate governance