What are the tell-tale signs of a business train wreck?

Marianne Jennings, a professor of legal and ethical studies at the W. P. Carey School of Business, identifies seven warning signs.

She goes into some detail explaining them: pressure to maintain numbers, a climate of fear and silence, a larger-than-life CEO surrounded by a sycophantic management team, usually made up of young inexperienced direct-reports yearning to be touched by greatness, a weak board, conflicts of interest, a drive for vision and constant innovation that results in hubris and blindness and focus on philanthropy and corporate social responsibility that masks rigged accounts and cooked books.

The last one is at first surprising but she's not wrong.

After all, Enron won six environmental awards in 2000 and published all its achievements in a report on economic, environmental and social performance. Its code of ethics ran to 64 pages.