History Lesson 
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?
(Page 2 of 4)
HNG fended off Coastal, but to protect the company from other takeover attempts, Lay nimbly engineered the sale of HNG in 1985 to a friendly Nebraska pipeline concern called InterNorth, one of the largest pipeline companies in the country at the time. Then, a funny thing happened: HNG started acting in a way that would characterize the company for years to come—a lot like Coastal. What the Nebraskans blithely labeled "the purchase" was being called "the merger" back in Houston, and before long, following some particularly brutal politicking between Omaha and Houston, the company's center of gravity started shifting toward Texas, and shortly after that, Ken Lay was running a new company called Enron. "Over time it became clear that Lay had a better vision of the future," says one person associated with Enron at that time. "He never fought change. He embraced change."
Lay had won, but what exactly did that mean? Enron was saddled with massive debt from the takeover attempt, and thanks to deregulation, no longer had exclusive use of its pipelines. Without new ideas—for that matter, a whole new business plan—the company could be finished before it really even got started.
LIKE MANY PEOPLE WHO TEAMED UP WITH ENRON IN THE EIGHTIES, Jeff Skilling had spent a lot of time in the Midwest, and he was self-made—at fourteen he had been the chief production director at a start-up TV station in Aurora, Illinois. (His mother would drop him off there every day after school.) "I liked being successful when I was working, and I was smart," he told BusinessWeek earlier this year. But unlike many of his Enron colleagues, Skilling wasn't deliberate and soft-spoken and happy to go home at five o'clock; he was anxious and excitable, and nothing, but nothing excited him more than what he would come to call "intellectual capital." He loved being smart, and he loved being surrounded by smart people. He graduated from Southern Methodist University, went into banking—assets and liability management—and took on Harvard Business School, where he graduated in the top 5 percent of his class. Then Skilling took the next step on what was then the new, souped-up path to American success: He joined Manhattan's McKinsey and Company as a business consultant, and that is where Ken Lay found him in 1985.
It is often said of Lay that his instincts for hiring the best are flawless, and his choice of Skilling probably saved the company. Skilling was above all an expert at markets and how they worked. While everyone else was worrying about the gluts and the shortages that defined the gas industry, he alone saw the parallels between gas and other businesses. And so in a world where credit was nearly impossible to come by, Skilling came up with what he called the Gas Bank, which contractually guaranteed both the supply and the price of gas to a network of suppliers and consumers. Enron would not be a broker but a banker. It would buy and sell the gas itself and assume the risk involved. And Enron would make money on transactions, much like an investment bank would.
Skilling worked up some numbers and found them "absolutely compelling." Then the McKinsey consultant took the idea to a meeting of about 25 Enron executives. He had a one-page presentation. "Almost to a person," Skilling says, "they thought it was stupid." Almost. After Skilling left the meeting dejected, he walked Ken Lay to an elevator and apologized. Lay listened and then said, "Let's go."
The Gas Bank was not an overnight success. For months Skilling woke up in a cold sweat, sure he had ruined not only his career but the careers of dozens of colleagues who had assisted him. In fact, he had come upon one of those divides that seem to define his life: "I believed this whole world would be different, a huge breakthrough" is the way Skilling puts it today, and even if he is typically immodest, he was right. Fairly soon after launching, the company sold $800 million worth of gas in a week. True to Skilling's character, success turned out to be a matter of old versus new: He says the joke around Enron was that if a company's CEO was under fifty, "We were in." And he was in too: In 1990 Skilling finally left McKinsey and joined Enron as the head of Enron Finance Corporation, a new division created just for him. In 1991 that company closed a deal that earned $11 million in profit. After that, says Skilling, "we never looked back."
Skilling and Lay also realized that the Gas Bank couldn't work unless it had a trading component. Myriad trades were needed to build the market that would make the project go. But by buying and selling enormous quantities of gas, Enron not only constructed a market but almost instantly came to dominate it. The company had the best contacts, the best intelligence, and the best access to supplies. That, in turn, attracted more customers who wanted to be part of the play. With so many customers in its pocket, Enron could better predict the direction of the market and could use that knowledge to make trades for its own benefit—Enron could in effect bet on which way the price of gas would go, as one might do with pork bellies or soybeans, but with startling accuracy, thereby generating profits higher than anyone could have ever imagined.
THIS CHANGE COULD NEVER HAVE OCCURRED without another change Skilling had made: He created, within Enron, a new culture to match its new trading business. The idea was to build a "knowledge-based business," which demanded a skill set not exactly prized by Enron's employees from the old HNG days. Most were deliberate, cautious, responsible, somewhat defensive people, most of them men, of course—the kind of people you'd expect to find working in an industry regulated by the federal government. But now the company needed bolder people for its bold new era: that included anyone who wanted to make money—lots of money—for themselves and for the company. "Enron was going to create a niche for itself or die," one former executive explains. "The people who had narrow views eventually were forced out, because if they had narrow views about other things, they had narrow views about the market."
Skilling wanted smart people but not just any smart people. He wanted the smartest people from schools like Harvard, Stanford, and maybe, Rice. And because his firm was now acting more like a bank than a pipeline company, he wanted to draw from the pool of recruits that would be attracted to the biggest and best investment banks, like Merrill Lynch or Credit Suisse First Boston. In addition to being smart, Enron people were also supposed to be "aggressive." You were right for Enron if you didn't want to wait until you were thirty to close your own deals or move up in an organization.
You could see what he was looking for on "Super Saturdays" at the Houston headquarters: eight fifty-minute interviews with ten minute breaks in between—the company might herd as many as four hundred people through in just one day. They were scored from 1 to 5 on their smarts, their problem-solving ability, their passion for hard work, and what at Enron was called "a sense of urgency." People who scored less than 2.5 were scratched. The shrewdest candidates knew how to work Enron before they were even hired: These were the types that automatically turned down the company's first offer, knowing Enron would come back with more. The starting salary was around $80,000. Maybe it wasn't a fortune—yet—but the signing bonus, about $20,000, was more than enough for a lease on the obligatory Porsche Boxster or one of the lofts being renovated close to downtown. (Enron people didn't live in far-flung suburbs. Suburbs were uncool and too far from the office.)
For the lucky winners, Enron offered the corporate equivalent of a gifted-and-talented program. New associates learned the latest techniques for structuring energy deals, and there were rotations at Enron offices around the globe. The hours were long, but every possible need was taken care of. A company concierge handled all the things important people couldn't be bothered with: picking up dry cleaning or prescriptions, shining shoes, cleaning the house, planning a vacation. Of course, a lot of people who worked for Enron never got to take vacations—they were too busy making money—but they could use the company gym and the company's personal trainers. If they were overweight or wanted to quit smoking, they could join Enron's Wellness Program. Massages were offered six days a week, from seven in the morning until ten at night. "They were so cutting edge," rhapsodizes someone involved with the company health care program at the time. "They really thought about the psychology and what it took to keep these people going."
Skilling handed out titles analogous to those at Wall Street firms—analysts, associates, directors, and managing directors—but everyone knew that those titles didn't really matter. Money did. Instead of competitive salaries and decent bonuses, Enron offered competitive salaries and merit-based bonuses—with no cap. "If you really worked hard and delivered results, you could make a lot of money," says Ken Rice, who stayed with Enron for 21 years until resigning recently as the head of the company's faltering broadband division. Or, as the saying goes, you got to eat what you killed. Gas traders with two or three years of experience could wind up with a $1 million bonus. And the more you produced, the closer you got to Jeff: Real hot dogs joined him glacier hiking in Patagonia, Land Cruiser racing in Australia, or off-road motorcycling in a re-creation of the Baja 1,000 race, ending at a spectacular Mexican villa. "Every time he'd speak, I'd believe everything he'd say," one loyalist says.
My Library
