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?
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And why not? By 1995 Enron had become North America's largest natural-gas merchant, controlling 20 percent of the market. But at a company where the buzzword was "aggressive," that was no place to stop: Skilling and Lay believed the Gas Bank model could easily be applied to the electricity business. Firmly committed to the notion that a deregulated market meant better service at lower prices for consumers (and untold profits for Enron), they began barnstorming the country, pressing their case with entrenched power company presidents (who, with their multimillion-dollar salaries and monopoly service areas, had little incentive to change) and energy regulators (who were somewhat more receptive, thanks in part to Enron's generous lobbying efforts).
But the biggest winner of all was probably Jeff Skilling. In 1997 Ken Lay made him the president and chief operating officer of the company. By then, the division known as Enron Capital and Trade Resources was the nations largest wholesale buyer and seller of natural gas and electricity. The division had grown from two hundred to two thousand employees, and revenues from $2 billion to $7 billion. "Mr. Skilling's experience so far with the turmoil in the industry has convinced him that he is on the right track," the New York Times noted. Everyone would certainly have thought so: Enron and Skilling had totally transformed one industry and were well on their way to transforming another.
"FIRING UP AN IDEA MACHINE; Enron Is Encouraging the Entrepreneurs Within," sang the New York Times in 1999. "In the staid world of regulated utilities and energy companies, Enron Corp is that gate-crashing Elvis," crowed Fortune in 2000. Wall Street was demanding tech-size growth on a tech timetable, and Enron, in 2000, obliged with second quarter earnings of $289 million, up 30 percent from the previous year. That year the company seemed to discover a market a minute: Under Skilling, Enron was trading coal, paper, steel, and even weather. No one blinked when a London wine bar became an Enron client. People drank more in warm weather than cold, so why not buy a hedge against the usual winter downturn?
But most exciting to the financial world was Enron's entry into high-tech communications. Because of the company's marketing dominance, EnronOnline became another overnight success, handling $335 billion in commodity trades online in 2000. Enron, as usual, made its money on the spread between the bid price and the asking price. Then there was the broadband business: To Enron, trading excess capacity in large, high-speed fiber-optic networks (empty lanes on the fabled information highway) wasn't that different from trading the capacity of natural gas pipelines. So Enron created a market for what the industry calls bandwidth. Soon after, it also announced a twenty-year deal with Blockbuster to deliver movies on demand electronically to people in their homes. Enron looked like a company that couldn't lose. "Its strategy of building businesses, shedding hard assets, and trading various commodities can help it do well even in an uncertain market," BusinessWeek insisted.
There was, however, another reason Enron did so well in such a short time: the company's hard-nosed approach toward its customers. The old notion of customer service was based on the long haul—you had to nurse and coddle customers to keep them. But Enron had new markets and new ideas—customers had to come to it. Over time, the company stopping referring to its business clients as customers and began calling them "counterparties."
Skilling wanted the biggest profits on the shortest timetable: Gains were maximized by creating, owning, and then abandoning a market before it became overtaxed and overregulated. So if you wanted to launch a high-risk venture quickly—such as Zilkha Energy's new high-tech approach to drilling for oil—you got your financing from Enron because a bank would take forever to underwrite the project, if it ever would. But because Enron invented its markets and subsequently dominated them, Enron could set the terms of its deals, from the timeline to the method of accounting to whether the deal happened at all.
While many businesses used what was known in the industry as "mark-to-market accounting," for instance, Enron used it on an unprecedented scale. The company priced their deals at current market value—but it was always Enron's idea of the market value; companies that balked at their pricing didn't get deals. And while old-fashioned companies spread their profits out like annuities over a period of years, Enron took most of its profit up-front. However many millions would be made on a deal that covered several years, they went on the books in the current year. If a few analysts thought there might be something fishy about what they called "subjective accounting," investors didn't particularly care as long as the profits rolled in. As the market fluctuated and the landscape changed, the company might abandon a project that had been in the works for months because its profit margins weren't going to be high enough. "Enron is known for leaving people at the altar," says one former employee. Winning the highest possible profits for the company could even extend to Enron's attitude toward charity. When a fundraiser for the Houston READ Commission, a literacy group, called on Enron for a contribution, it was suggested that he start raising money for Enron's competing literacy charity: "Even the person who was supposed to give money away for Enron was supposed to make money for Enron," he says.
As Enron became more and more successful, the culture Skilling had created took on a dark side: The competition turned inward. As one member of the Enron family put it, "It became a company full of mercenaries." The change started at the bottom. As Enron's domination of the energy market grew, most of the recruiting frills fell away. New associates were treated much like the commodities the company traded. Global Change's Enron spies reported overhearing orders like "I need a smart person—go buy me one" or "Buy me an intelligent slave, quick." Enron had never been the kind of place where people sang to you on your birthday, but now the workaholism bordered on self-parody: A Random Acts of Kindness program lasted only a few months. It was too disruptive. People couldn't get their work done.
And, of course, Enron had a program for institutionalizing creative tension. The Performance Review Committee, which had initially been installed by Skilling in the Capital group, became known as the harshest forced ranking system in the country. Employees were rated on a scale of one to five, and those with fives were usually gone within six months. (The PRC's nickname quickly became "rank and yank.") It was a point of pride that Skilling's division replaced 15 percent of its workforce every year. As one Skilling associate put it, "Jeff viewed this like turning over the inventory in a grocery store." Skilling's approach to business—get in and get out—had become Enron's attitude toward its workers. In time, it would become many workers' attitude toward the company. Teamwork, never that valuable in a trading culture, went the way of the eyeshade and the abacus. If protocol required an Enron higher-up to come from Europe to help with a project in the Third World, he might help—or he might not, depending on whether another, potentially more lucrative project was pending elsewhere.
Everyone felt the pressure to perform on a massive scale at massive speed: "They were so goal oriented toward immediate gratification that they lost sight of the future," says one former employee. Anyone who couldn't close deals within a quarter was punished with bad PRC scores, as were the higher-ups who had backed them. Past errors and old grudges were dredged up so often as new ammunition in PRC meetings that the phrase "No old tapes" became an Enron cliché. "People went from being geniuses to idiots overnight," says one former Enron executive.
In such a hothouse, paranoia flowered. New contracts contained highly restrictive confidentiality agreements about anything pertaining to the company. E-mail was monitored. A former executive routinely carried two laptops, one for the company and one for himself. People may have been rich at Enron, but they weren't necessarily happy. One recruiter described the culture this way: "They roll you over and slit your throat and watch your eyes while you bleed to death."
BEFORE JEFF SKILLING COULD TRANSFORM ENRON from the world's leading energy company into the world's leading company, he had to make one more change: Just as he had done ten years before, Skilling had to purge the company of its remaining old order. Where Enron once prized cautious executives who dealt with tangible assets like pipelines, it now valued bold executives who dealt with intangible assets. Pipelines, power plants—they may have been Enron's pride, but Skilling wanted them gone. Expensive, long-term building projects had no place when Wall Street was devoted to quick profits and enormous returns on investment capital, and Skilling knew it. "It wasn't the time for long-term approaches," an Enron executive says of Wall Street's mood. "It was the technology era."
To rid Enron of the last vestiges of its past, Skilling had to take on Rebecca Mark, long considered his rival for the CEO's job. Mark was for many years the poster child for the Enron way: Young, attractive, aggressive—her nickname was Mark the Shark—she came from sturdy Midwestern stock but had the requisite Harvard MBA. Mark was largely responsible for the success of Enron International, the asset-heavy side of the company where she developed $20 billion worth of gas and power plants, which accounted for 40 percent of Enron's profits in 1998. For this she reaped breathtaking compensation—one Enron executive estimated $10 million—and adoring press clips, including two appearances on Fortune's list of the fifty most powerful women in corporate America.
But then Mark ran into trouble with a gas-fired power plant in Dabhol, India, one of the largest ever constructed. She had played the game the Enron way: Taking Enron into a new market, she had finagled low import taxes (20 percent instead of the usual 53) and hung in through 24 lawsuits and three changes in government. But the time and expense needed to make India and other Enron plants around the globe successful did not mesh with Enron's goals, and Skilling's impatience with Mark grew.
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