What is truth?

Don't invest in companies managed by execs who utter ultimate truths.

The former Enron chairman and chief executive was only the latest corporate honcho to find himself in the twilight-zone world of the witness stand, a place where people very much used to power and control find, maddeningly, that they no longer call the shots.

"It's been a highly unquestioned culture that has been created around them," said Rakesh Khurana, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School and author of "Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs."

For Lay, "This is a new norm," Khurana added. "This is a culture he's not used to, being aggressively questioned, and where his every utterance isn't seen as the ultimate truth."