The Justice sat down for an exclusive interview with Sherron Watkins, the former Enron executive who alerted then-Enron CEO Ken Lay to accounting fraud within the company. Watkins travels around the world lecturing about "whistle-blowing" and ethics in business. Below are excerpts from the interview.

JustNews: What are your goals in coming to Brandeis and giving lectures?

Sherron Watkins: What I'm hoping is just to prepare college students for the fact that they will face ethical challenges, and [these challenges] will be a surprise. They will be a shock and the tendency is to be a bit like a deer in the headlights, … [meaning] that you are going to stay in the road until the car hits you. And that tends to be what happens. … And its inaction, which is what 90 percent of the people choose to do, ends up pushing them along and they become part of the fraud or the problem or the unethical activity. So I want to hopefully add to their toolkit that when you're exposed to an ethical challenge: Here's some potential things to do; but don't just stand in the road staring, that will end up in your demise.

JN: You have been termed a "whistle-blower" by this series and by the media. How do you define whistle-blower?

SW: It's an unfortunate term. I met with Ken Lay, the CEO and chairman of Enron; I contacted Arthur Andersen staff, some peers and friends of mine; but that is not necessarily going outside the company, it was going to the outside auditors. … Congress found my memos in a box of subpoenaed documents. In that same year, Cynthia Cooper [former vice president at WorldCom], who had gone to the audit committee of the board at WorldCom, helped undo that fraud. And then Coleen Rowley was at the FBI. And Time magazine named us their persons of the year. They put us on the cover and called it the year of the whistle-blower. … So we were all reporting, maybe we skipped our bosses, but we were alerting internally to problems, and Time magazine did that year of the whistle-blower. It's a label that is no good either way. I have friends who say, "don't let them call you a whistle-blower. … You're not a snitch, you were trying to get the company to do the right thing, you were trying to save the company by not telling and having them be attacked by the outside." Then you have other people say "How dare you call yourself a whistle-blower. You didn't go outside the company." It also means your corporate career is over with, it's synonymous with troublemaker so it's not a good label. The bigger concern I have is that underlying that question, "How dare you call yourself a whistle-blower? You didn't go outside the company" is the false belief that going to the press or the [Securities and Exchange Commission] makes a difference at all. Harry Markopolos sent credible information to the SEC for 8.5 years. … Nothing. … I think people have this false sense that if only truth tellers would step out and go to the financial press or go to the media or go to the SEC, wrongdoing would be stopped.

JN: Would you call yourself a whistle-blower?

SW: I don't know what the term means. What does it mean to you? I'm not sure what it means because I've never really heard anyone adequately define it. I don't like the label.

JN: Why did you go to Ken Lay and not the press?

SW: There's not one case of the press believing a whistle-blower that they did not already have a relationship with. If you can find one, I'll pay you 100 bucks. There's not really a good case of journalists really believing a whistle-blower. When the evidence is already out there, [journalists] jump on board. … My goal was to have the company live and for the company to live, they need to come clean. They need to report, we have found wrongdoing, we are cleaning up this, we are making this adjustment, and then they have a chance of living. If they are exposed from the outside, they almost certainly go bankrupt. And so my attempt was to try to see if Ken Lay would do the right thing.

JN: How can we change this culture among the media?

SW: I think WikiLeaks is going to be a very interesting phenomenon. And not necessarily this Julian Assange stuff … but the concept that there might be people with servers around the world keeping the documents bouncing around and kind of a rogue way of disclosing. But what I like about WikiLeaks is you can remain anonymous and you can put documents behind it.

JN: How do you think individuals at companies can be encouraged to do the right thing?

SW: My main point is if your value system is being challenged, make your protest but leave. Because you can't change the value system from the bottom or the middle or even a couple rungs from the top, and you really want to work for a company where the leadership is pristine ethics-wise.