He felt that a business should be able to declare profits at the moment of the creative act that would earn those profits. Otherwise businessmen were mere coupon clippers, reaping the benefit of innovation that had been devised in the past by other, greater men. Taken to its absurd extreme, this line of thinking suggests that General Motors should book all the future profits of a new model automobile at the moment the car is designed, long before a single vehicle rolls off the assembly line to be sold to customers. Over time this radical notion of value came to define the way Enron presented
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