Some comments from an Enron discussion board...
<<...After all, the Enron saga offers all the sprawling comic richness and icy moral clarity of a Tom Wolfe novel. Back in the mid-’80s, it was just a dingy little gas-pipeline company. But capitalizing on the Reagan era’s vogue of deregulation, Enron reinvented itself, turning into a behemoth that traded in energy rather than merely providing it. By 2000, it had become the poster boy for the benefits of deregulation and limited government oversight. Here was a $60 billion concern that smugly called itself the “World’s Leading Company.” And why not? Although Enron had a low public profile — have you ever even seen its tilted “E” logo? — it was idolized by financial publications. And like a tumor, it was growing inexorably bigger, even building pipelines and plants in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, India, Mozambique, the Philippines and China. Meanwhile, back in Houston, the corporate hotshots behaved as if the word hubris hadn’t yet been translated into Texan.
In a superb article in the December 9 Houston Chronicle, reporter Greg Hassell offered a portrait of Enron’s glory days, laying bare a gaudy corporate culture that was busy readying its vanities for the bonfire: Beyond the in-building health club and free Starbucks coffee, silver Porsches became an obligatory parking-lot status symbol, and traders were known to freak out when their annual bonus was only half a million bucks. This conspicuous consumption was encouraged by an evangelical leadership that one former executive compared to the Taliban — either you were for the company or you were an infidel. To call down an Enron fatwa, you needed merely ask for proof of its extravagant claims of profitability (proof its accountants obviously didn’t seek very diligently).
As Hassell explains, Enron focused on deals that looked lucrative in the short term — “My bonus is based on what I do this quarter,” shrieked one of its agonized traders — even if they were long-term disasters. Such shortsightedness didn’t just sap the company, it led to an abject lack of social responsibility. When Enron wasn’t driving up energy prices in California last year, it was buying up, then destroying Oregon’s homegrown energy system; in India, human-rights groups have compelling evidence of physical violence against villagers who opposed new plants by Enron subsidiary Dabhol Power Co. This same casual amorality turned office politics into one endless episode of Corporate Survivor, in which a policy nicknamed “rank and yank” had employees give one another annual ratings, with the bottom 15 percent being fired. In such a cutthroat culture, it’s hardly surprising that Enron execs would sell off their own shares for a fortune and prohibit underlings from doing the same, even when it became obvious that Enron stock was sinking faster than a Soviet sub. Such is the fine art of bankruptcy...>> |
