Q: What's the difference between a corporate crook and a juvenile delinquent?
A: One is a ruthless rebel who holds the laws and rules of society in absolute contempt and who doesn't give a stuff about anyone else. The other one hangs out at shopping malls and railway stations.

It's a distinction that comes to mind when you think about the bad boys in suits behind the hubris and lies at Enron.

And what about Parmalat with its former chief financial officer Fausto Tonna's testimony that the food and dairy giant began falsifying earnings reports to cover up its losses back in 1994?

That's right, 1994. Wow, that's nearly 10 years before the scandal surfaced when the company acknowledged that a $5 billion account that its Cayman Island subsidiary Bonlat claimed to hold with Bank of America didn't exist.

So how the hell could they keep the subterfuge going for so long?

Harvard Business School's Abraham Zaleznik has maintained that entrepreneurs who go off the rails are like delinquents. And unless we are talking about individuals putting their fingers in the till, it usually involves other people aiding and abetting the crime. Auditors help cook the books, executives look the other way or help themselves to the spoils and, in some cases, regulators pretend that it's not happening or admit privately that it's all too hard.

In other words, we are talking about a "delinquent community". That's the common thread running through every corporate collapse or outbreak of corporate crime, from WorldCom to Hollinger International.

Zaleznik described it in this interview I had with him some time ago.

But here's the problem: this delinquency is really the dark side of the risk-taking and determination that helps create great companies. It happens when the risk-taking goes too far.

That's why it will keep happening and no legislation can stop that. That's also what makes corporate pathology, and the attempts by lawmakers to stop it, so fascinating. Don't forget, one of the big arguments against Sarbanes-Oxley is that it shackles entrepreneurs. Thoughts?