Enron's advertising campaign, launched in 1999, consisted of the words Ask Why.
The advertisements did not explain what the company did. They implied that the viewer was in the presence of an intelligence that operated at a level requiring no explanation, and invited them to admire it.
The performance had an enforcement half, and it was delivered on an analyst call on 17 April 2001.
Richard Grubman of Highfields Capital asked Jeffrey Skilling a question. Enron was, at that point, the only financial institution that did not produce a balance sheet or cash flow statement with its earnings, and Grubman said so.
Skilling said: Well, thank you very much, we appreciate that — asshole.
The remark was widely reported and, in the culture of the moment, was largely received as evidence of confidence. Skilling later apologized. Grubman had been asking the correct question, and Enron filed for bankruptcy seven months later.
Two mechanisms combine, and the combination is the reason this chapter sits beside the last one.
Confident opacity reads as competence. The link between fluency and perceived authority is well established: a speaker who displays no doubt is judged more expert, regardless of content, and a question that appears too sophisticated to answer briefly is often read as evidence of depth rather than of evasion. Ask Why is a curiosity gap with nothing behind it.
And the public humiliation of a skeptic supplies normative enforcement. Deutsch and Gerard's distinction between informational and normative influence is the relevant one here: the analysts on that call learned nothing about Enron's balance sheet, and they learned a great deal about the social cost of asking for it. That is chapter 8's conformity pressure applied deliberately, and it works on the observers rather than on the target.
The result is an audience that feels sophisticated for not asking — which is the more elegant half of the mechanism, because it converts the absence of scrutiny into a status position rather than a failure.
The general form recurs constantly and is not confined to finance. A person or organization that responds to a straightforward request for information with contempt for the questioner has answered the question. What they have communicated is that the information is not available and that the cost of pursuing it will be social rather than evidentiary.
Grubman's question was six sentences long and it was right.
Cross-ref: Attack — Punish the First Defector