the Enron congressional converage is at fever pitch today. The ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX affiliates in Houston are all showing the Enron Congressional Hearings live this morning.
I've found a very succint quote from one of the below mentioned site:
It was the lust to expand into new businesses and foreign markets, which caused our downfall
Fox has a ticker running on the bottom of the screen that is showing a timeline of events, where Skilling got his MBA.
and urls laydoff.com
1400smith.com
I have to look upon this piquant definition from the laydoff.com site with empathy
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laydoff.com
laydoff (layd-ôf) noun. 1. The frustrating suspension or dismissal of employees, usually perpetrated by, wantonly avaricious company officials, who have been accused of grossly mismanaging their company or organization. 2. The heart-wrenching interval for which employment has been suspended by an alleged, pernicious executive management team. 3. Any period of temporary inactivity or rest, which is the direct result of coming in contact with one or more person(s) who are seemingly guilty of consistently committing one or more of the seven deadly sins (Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Covetousness, & Sloth).
Incredible. One moment you are thinking about your next rotation or new permanent position at Enron Corp., and the next moment your company is telling you to leave the building in thirty minutes and to not come back. On top of this absurdity, your 401k is depleted, your after-tax severance packages are reduced to one month's mortgage payment, and those who sent you packing are buying Hill Country or ski slope vacation properties with their exorbitant retention bonuses. As former employees of Enron, we at laydoff.com wish to keep the embers of our emotions burning by branding them on our T-shirts, which express our outrage in a direct, classy and tongue-in-cheek manner. We hope to create T-shirts for ex-Enron employees, shareholders and the sympathetic general public who wish to remind the world that they will never forget this avoidable injustice. We will never forget the hard-working people we met and befriended at Enron and we will never forget those who ruined such a wonderful place to work. Please consider buying one of our T-shirts. Let's wear our feelings together.
Corporate America is very different today than it was during our parents' career-building years, and our children's career building years will certainly be different from our present experiences. Laydoff.com would like to be viewed as the working person's voice with regard to the ever-increasing corporate abuse of power at the hands of the hard-working corporate masses. Laydoff.com would like to be the forum to expose financial and cultural abuses of corporate power by providing apparel to express our distaste for apparent unethical and unwanted behavior. Laydoff.com's aim is to help quickly expose those workplaces that harm their employees and/or which contradict their stated corporate values. We plan to unite and continually remind those employees of their villainous employers. Laydoff.com has no malicious intentions. We strive to produce poignant slogans, which are intended to chide those abusers of their corporate powers. Hopefully, laydoff.com's efforts will help improve our current work experiences and help to insure that our children's future career-building experiences are just, pleasant and fruitful.
My Treatise on Enron
By John Allario, creator & founder of Laydoff.com
My feelings for Enron, my former employer, are complex. Mounting a defense of Enron and my work as a Manager in the energy risk management, marketing and business development groups throughout my six year career at Enron may seem ludicrous at this time, as Enron and it officers, accountants, Board of Directors and attorneys, have been accused of committing various civil and criminal securities, corruption, fraud and racketeering offenses. These accusations seem to carry a special vehemence due to Enron management's nonchalance and its flaunting of an elitist attitude in the face of regulatory, prosecutorial and Wall Street scrutiny. Even so, I believe well intentioned, but misinformed statements or questions about Enron's legacy as a Fortune 500 company and mine and many of my current and former colleagues' roles, while working there, should be properly addressed and our workman-like efforts praised.
Specifically, Enron's crowning achievement was its innovative risk management products and services and its sophisticated commodity trading E-commerce platform, EnronOnline. Together, these risk management tools and EnronOnline's traded products provided customers with real time trading and real time commodity insurance hedges. A commodity's price, location and credit risks are all supremely critical issues faced by the world's businesses, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Ignoring for now the financial diseases metastasizing off our balance sheets, no other company in the world was providing more comprehensive and cost effective hedging programs to its customers. The irony of Enron' collapse is that the company with the greatest knowledge of commodity risk management under one roof was felled by it failure to adequately police the wonton financial structuring risks, to which we were exposing ourselves. Ironically, Enron's Chinese Wall prevented our world-class risk controls from seeping across to the investment banking side of our company.
Enron's risk management products will continue to be copied and emulated by our former competitors, regardless of Enron's or Netco/UBS Warburg's ultimate success or failure. Many of these financial products will continue to prosper under the direction of such energy and risk management firms as Dynegy, El Paso, Williams, Mirant, JP Morgan, AEP, Cinergy, Calpine, RWE, and even Edison and PG&E. One may not have expected to hear such company passion from a disgruntled, "laydoff", Enron worker, who is responsible for the creation of a satirical website named in jest after his ex-Chairman and ex-CEO.
I think we (Enronites) feel somewhat like war veterans (stay with me on this one). The returning Vets (ex-Enron and current employees) were called war-mongers (had no economic purpose), and these Vets (Enronites) also came to hate the war they (we) had fought (working at Enron), due to the apparent self-serving and duplicitous behavior of the many allegedly corrupt senior officers, who in Enron's case, evidently mismanaged the company's affairs. It is very hard for some of us Enronites to listen to outsiders vilify our years of service at Enron. We were just the soldiers, who believed we handled risk mitigation better than anyone in the energy industry. What many do not understand is this risk management and trading business at Enron began with noble intentions and was based on sound policies. It was the lust to expand into new businesses and foreign markets, which caused our downfall and spawned our alleged corruption and rule bending practices. These new businesses and markets required a lot of new capital fast. Access to quick capital was acquired through hundreds of Enron's abusive and complex funding sources and concomitant financial structures, which ultimately led to our collapse.
Enron was really two fiefdoms; (1) the existing trading and customer risk management business in mature markets (gas, power, liquids) and (2) the business development faction, which sought growth in new markets and businesses (India, Brazil, the Far East, broadband, water, intermodal transportation, computer components). I worked in both fiefdoms during my tenure at Enron and understood each faction's purported mission and management characteristics. The trading and risk management fiefdom was a business unit of which many of us could be proud.
Another lofty analogy for Enron may be that of the collapse of Rome. Enron pushed itself to meet unsustainable growth expectations and oozed an elitist attitude of invincibility, while pursuing its financial goals. Ultimately, corruption, ego and the lack of discipline crushed both Rome and Enron. Some of us gladiators fought the good fight, learning only too late with everyone else that our Emperor really had no clothes.
Unfortunately, it is not wise or popular right now to defend anything Enron did or tried to accomplish. It has become a reflex response to just bash all those associated with, employed or formerly employed by Enron as overpaid, greedy, elitist and economically superfluous. I believe none of those adjectives describe who I am nor do they describe any of my friends at or formerly with Enron. It may be best for all Enronites to just cover their heads, as investigators and the media continue to uncover additional bitter and sordid details of company misconduct. Why try to defend one's allegiance to, job function at, or corporate esprit de corps for Enron, when its three leading actors will be dragging their respective crosses up Capitol Hill in the coming weeks? Can justice ever be served and restitution be made to all those investors who lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars? Will we ever feel satisfied or feel we know what each of the accused was really thinking or scheming to do?
It is time for all of us ex-Enronites to put this chapter of our lives behind us and allow the pundits to write the Enron gospels. It will be interesting to see if Enron's senior management can ever raise themselves from their professional deaths and perhaps, one day, find public redemption like the once, mighty, former King of Drexel Burnham Lambert found through his charitable works.
John Allario
Ex-Enron Manager and Founder & Creator of Laydoff.com |
