How Enron Blew It
Less than a year ago, the Houston-based energy behemoth had everything: money, power, glitz, smarts, new ideas, and a CEO who wanted to make it the most important company in the world. Now its stock is down, wall street is bearish, and the CEO is gone. What went wrong?
Illustration by Guy Billout
The Enron skyscraper near the south end of Houston’s downtown feels like the international headquarters of the best and the brightest. The lobby in no way resembles the hushed, understated entryways of the old-fashioned oil companies, like Shell and Texaco nearby. Enron, in contrast, throbs with modernity. The people hustling in and out of the elevators are black, white, brown; Asian, Middle Eastern, European, African, as well as American-born. They are young, mostly under 35, and dressed in the aggressively casual uniform of the tech industry—the guys wear khakis, polo shirts, and Banana Republic button-downs. Almost preposterously fit, they move through the building intently, like winners. Enron is nothing if not energetic: A Big Brother-size TV screen frantically reports on the stock market near a bank of elevators, while another hefty black television relaying the same news greets people entering from the garage. A sculpture of the corporate symbol, an E tipped at a jaunty angle, radiates colors as it spins frenetically on its axis; a Starbucks concession on the ground floor keeps everyone properly caffeinated. Multicolored, inspirational flags hang from the ceiling, congratulating Enron on its diversity and its values; one more giant banner between elevator banks declares Enron's simple if grandiose goal: "From the World's Leading Energy Company to . . . The World's Leading Company!"
For a while, that future seemed guaranteed, as Enron transformed itself from a stodgy, troubled pipeline company in 1985 to a trading colossus in 2000. It was a Wall Street darling, with a stock price that increased 1,700 percent in that sixteen-year period, with revenues that increased from $40 billion to $100 billion. "The very mention of the company in energy circles throughout the world creates reactions ranging from paralyzing fear to envy," notes a 2001 report from Global Change Associates, a firm that provides market intelligence to the energy business.
This Enron was largely the creation of Jeff Skilling, a visionary determined to transform American business. Hired sixteen years ago as a consultant by then-CEO Ken Lay, Skilling helped build a company that disdained the old formula of finding energy in the ground, hauling it in pipelines, and then selling it to refineries and other customers. Instead, it evolved into a company that could trade and market energy in all its forms, from natural gas to electricity, from wind to water. If you had a risky drilling venture, Enron would fund it for a piece of the action. If you wanted your megacorporation's energy needs analyzed and streamlined, Enron could do the job. If you were a Third World country with a pitiful infrastructure and burgeoning power needs, Enron was there to build and build. Basically, if an idea was new and potentially—and fantastically—lucrative, Enron wanted the first crack. And with each success, Enron became ever more certain of its destiny. The company would be the bridge between the old economy and the high-tech world, and in February of this year, Skilling reaped his reward when he succeeded Lay as chief executive officer. Enron, says Skilling, "was a great marriage of the risk-taking mentality of the oil patch with the risk-taking mentality of the financial markets."
The Enron story reflects the culture that drove American business at the end of the twentieth century. Like the high-tech companies it emulated, Enron was going to reinvent the American business model and, in turn, the American economy. Maybe it was natural that this Brave New World also produced a culture that was based on absolutes: not just the old versus the new, but the best versus the mediocre, the risk takers versus the complacent—those who could see the future versus those who could not. The key was investing in the right kind of intellectual capital. With the best and the brightest, a company couldn't possibly go wrong.
Or could it? Today Enron's stock trades at around $35, down from a high of $80 in January. The press cast Enron as the archvillain of California's energy crisis last spring, and Skilling caught a blueberry pie in the face for his relentless defense of the free market. A long-troubled power plant project in India threatened the company's global ambitions. Telecommunications, in which Enron was heavily invested, imploded. Wall Street analysts who once touted the company questioned its accounting practices. Some of the change in Enron's fortunes can be attributed to the economic downturn in uncertain times that has afflicted all of American business. But the culture that the company created and lived by cannot escape blame.
ENRON, JEFF SKILLING SAYS, HAD "a totally different way of thinking about business—we got it." At Enron, in fact, you either "got it" or you were gone—it was as simple as black and white. It is not coincidental, then, that the color scheme of Skilling's River Oaks mansion mirrors the corporation he once headed. Here, the living room's white walls shimmer against the mahogany floors. Black leather trims the edge of snowy carpets. Billowy sofas set off the jet-black baby grand. In the entry, white orchids cascade from a black vase on a black pedestal table that in turn pools onto cold, white marble. There is only one off-color note: After almost twenty years, Jeff Skilling is no longer associated with Enron, having resigned abruptly after just six months as CEO. Once, Skilling was hailed as the next Jack Welch (General Electric's masterful CEO), as one of Worth magazine's best CEO's in America (anointed in 2001), and even as a daredevil who hosted the kind of unchained adventure junkets in which, a friend told BusinessWeek, "someone could actually get killed." Today, he sounds more like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning. "I had no idea what I'd let go of," Skilling says of all the personal sacrifices he made while retooling Enron.
From a black chair in the white library, across from a huge black and white photograph of his daughter and two sons, Skilling clarifies. The demands of working 24-7 for Enron caused him to ignore his personal finances. Divorced, he lived in a 2,200-square-foot house without a microwave or a dishwasher. He almost missed his brother's wedding. "Learning a foreign language—I never learned a foreign language!" he exclaims. He never once took his youngest son to school. "I'm interested in the kids. You don't do kids in fifteen-minute scheduling." Travel: "You can't go to Africa for a week and get anything out of it!" Skilling includes the study of architecture and design on his list of missed opportunities, then he stops and sighs. "I'm not sure that fulfillment in life is compatible with a CEO's job," he says, finally. Then his eyes lock on mine, and his voice, which had softened, regains its pragmatic edge. "It would have been easy to stay," he says. "But that would not have been good for me."
He's a smallish, ruddy-faced man who keeps himself at fighting weight, handsome in the way of corporate titans, with piercing cheekbones and that assiduously stolid gaze. But the impatience Skilling once reserved for cautious underlings and dull-witted utility company executives is now targeted at reporters who have labeled his resignation "bizarre" and associates who are bitterly skeptical of his need for family time. His shrug stretches the limits of his shimmering blue button-down, and his matching blue eyes look put upon. "I'm surprised," he says, "that people have so much trouble understanding this."
PEOPLE WHO PASSED THROUGH DOWNTOWN HOUSTON in the late eighties or early nineties couldn't help but notice a funny and, for its time, novel scene unfolding throughout the workday at the base of the Enron Building. From nine to five and before and after, you could see people slipping out of the pristine silver skyscraper to smoke. They perched on the chrome banisters or lurked near the glass doors at the entry, puffing like mad. They always looked hurried and furtive, even ashamed. Whatever people knew about Enron in those days (and most people didn't know much), it was often associated with that scene: Enron boasted one of the first nonsmoking corporate headquarters in Houston, and there couldn't have been clearer evidence of its break with the energy world of the past. What macho engineer would have put up with such humiliation?
But this company was a child of another time, that period in the mid-eighties when chaos enveloped the gas business. Federal deregulation of natural gas turned a steady, secure industry, in which gas pipeline companies frequently enjoyed a monopoly in portions of the areas that they served, into a volatile free-for-all. The situation was compounded five years later by federal deregulation of the pipeline business. So it happened that a gentlemanly gas pipeline company, Houston Natural Gas (HNG) found itself under attack from Coastal Corporation, Oscar Wyatt's less than gentlemanly firm. HNG was then run by Lay, a sturdy, taciturn former economics professor and Transco chief operating officer who had a passion for military strategy. (His doctoral thesis at the University of Houston was on supply and demand in the Vietnam War.) Lay, who was from Missouri and never succumbed—at least outwardly—to Texas brashness, had done well enough: Thanks to canny expansions, HNG's pipelines stretched from Florida to California and throughout the state of Texas.
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