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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Forcing Mark out, however, was no easy matter. Key executives left, divisions were dismantled, but she remained. The truth was Enron didn't mind firing lower-level employees, but it hated to fire the kind of aggressive, relentless people it tended to promote. The company preferred humiliation—keeping a director in his cubicle, say, but failing to include him in the glamour deals, or kicking someone upstairs with a fancy title. (One particularly difficult executive won a few years at graduate school, gratis.) A company as smart as Enron could probably deduce too that dispatching one of the most visible businesswomen in the country would provoke a public-relations disaster. So Lay and Skilling did something classically Enronian: They gave Mark her own company. Despite Skilling's contempt for asset-heavy businesses, Enron spent more than $2 billion to buy a run-of-the-mill British water utility that could serve as Enron's entry into the emerging world of water privatization. Mark was put in charge of making Enron, yes, the world's greatest water company. Azurix, as the new business was called, looked like another sure thing: Its IPO in 1999 raised $695 million.
But Mark had to succeed on Enron's increasingly abbreviated timetable in a business fraught with political and emotional complexities. Water is not like gas or electricity—owners and governments are a lot less willing to give it up, even for lots of money. The company stumbled, layoffs commenced, and confidence evaporated. By August 2000 the stock price, which had started out at $19, had fallen to $5. Mark's resignation followed, and Azurix, much diminished, was folded into Enron. "I think it's best for Rebecca to start afresh," Lay, who had been a mentor to Mark, told the Wall Street Journal. Or as one critic put it, "They were more interested in destroying the old culture than running a business."
As 2000 drew to a close, Skilling was in total command. In December Ken Lay announced the inevitable: "The best time for the succession to occur is when the company is doing well," he told the press. "Enron is doing extremely well now." In February 2001 Jeff Skilling took over the CEO's job.
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY THE TROUBLE STARTED. Enron's domination of the electric-power market made it an instant target in the California deregulation debacle. Both PBS's Frontline and the New York Times took on Enron, portraying the company as a heartless colossus that used its influence in Washington (Lay and Enron's political action committee are the top contributors to George W. Bush) to force old people on fixed incomes to choose between buying food or electricity. Skilling and Lay appeared on camera singing belligerent anthems to the free market, while another memorable scene juxtaposed one of the company's jackallike traders against a hapless state employee in California, as both tried to buy power online. The Times reported that Lay had tried to persuade a new federal commissioner to change his views on energy deregulation. The bad press was, to say the least, ironic: Just as the media was pounding Enron for its omnipotence, Wall Street was discovering its weaknesses. By late March the stock price had slid to $50 a share from $80 in January.
Within Enron, the asset-based divisions took the rap for the decline. (The India plant continued to be enormously costly, at least in part because of constant turnover within Enron's management team.) But the California situation was more visible and therefore more damaging, despite Enron's claim that the state had never built enough power plants to service its population and never properly managed those it had. "For three months Gray Davis did a very good job of blaming us," says Mark Palmer, a vice president for corporate communications. "We were a Texas company. There was a Texan in the White House. California was a state that didn't put him in office, and his biggest contributor was a Texas energy company. Performance is going to take care of our stock price. The truth will take care of Gray Davis." (California utilities still owe Enron $500 million, another reason stockholders might be panicky.) But more problematic than the crisis itself was Skilling's all too apparent lack of contrition. Facing down his critics, he cracked a joke comparing California with the Titanic. ("At least the Titanic went down with its lights on.")
But the biggest problem was Enron's telecommunications division, which had been responsible for at least one third of its heady stock price. Investors believed that Enron could revolutionize high-speed communications, just as it had revolutionized gas and power. Enron estimated the global market for buying and selling space over fiber-optic cable would grow from $155 billion in 2001 to $383 billion by 2004—but then the tech bubble burst. So too did the much-hyped movies-on-demand deal with Blockbuster. For the first time in its confoundingly successful life, Enron had nothing new to take to market. Like the popular high school girl who suddenly packs on a few pounds, Enron suddenly looked less alluring to Wall Street.
Skilling launched a campaign to keep Enron's most important cheerleaders, the stock analysts, in the tent, but he wasn't cut out to be a supplicant. During the reporting of first quarter profits, he called an analyst who challenged Enron's financial reporting an "asshole." When the company reported hefty second quarter profits, many analysts questioned whether those profits had come from the generation of new business or from the sale of old assets. Ignoring the growing chorus critical of Enron's accounting, Skilling promised, as he always had, that innovations were just around the corner. "There wasn't any positive news," Carol Coale, of Prudential Financial, says now. "Basically, he talked me out of a downgrade."
The business press, so generous in the past, turned surly. Fortune had asked in March whether Enron was overpriced. ("Start with a pretty straightforward question: How exactly does Enron make its money?") The routine cashing in of stock options that were about to expire by key executives was portrayed in the media as a fire sale. (Skilling had sold $33 million worth, Ken Lay and Ken Rice close to four times that amount.) Then the Wall Street Journal reported on a fund run by the CFO that had been a source of strife within the company. (It was essentially risk management against Enron's possible failures.) Every negative story seemed to produce a concurrent drop in the stock price: By late August it had fallen below $40. Enron, so institutionally unforgiving, finally got a taste of its own medicine. "When Wall Street is in love with a stock, they're forgiving of something like accounting," says Carol Coale. "When a company falls out of favor, all these issues carry more weight."
This fact was not lost on people inside the company, who suddenly started experiencing an attack of conscience. Those who had looked the other way as the most powerful Enron executives dumped their wives and married their secretaries or carried on flagrant interoffice affairs now saw the error of their ways. "It just created an attitude," one executive still at Enron says. "If senior people are doing that, why are we held to a higher standard? There was a real culture of 'We're above everyone else.'"
Loyalty had never been prized at Enron, so there was no reason to expect it now. An old-fashioned, slow-moving company like Exxon could demand hardship duty in Baku with the promise of greater rewards down the road. "But," as one Houston oilman explains, "if you have to negotiate a hardship duty with someone who doesn't have loyalty and has money, then you have a corporation that's better suited for good times than bad."
As it turned out, that description applied to Jeff Skilling too. As the stock price stubbornly refused to ascend, he made no secret of his unhappiness and frustration. Then, after a trip to visit the families of three employees killed at a plant in England, he had an epiphany: Life was short; for him, Enron was over. Ever stoic, Ken Lay returned to the CEO's office, named a new president, arranged a trip to New York to calm analysts and investors, and promised a kinder, gentler Enron in the future. Trading anything and everything was out. The company, Lay says, will still innovate but "innovate much closer to our core." As for the culture: "Things like the Performance Review Committee, I think we could have applied better. By trying to categorize people into so many different categories, you ended up creating a morale problem."
That Skilling's supposedly brilliant colleagues were as shocked at the news of his departure as the rest of the business community may be testament to their lack of emotional intelligence. Despite Skilling's lengthy tenure with Enron, he'd always been contemptuous of the long haul; he'd always believed in cutting losses and moving on. But now that he was abandoning them when the company was in trouble, it was different. "Even Jeff's biggest detractors wouldn't have wanted him to walk out the door," one loyalist admits.
But on the day we meet, Skilling is looking forward, not back. "Look," he says with finality, "ninety percent of my net worth is in Enron. Were my interests aligned with the shareholders? Absolutely."
Free of falling stock prices and shareholder pressures, he is nestling himself back into the world of ideas. His eyes flash as he talks about new technologies. "The first wave never gets it right," he says. "The stand-alone dot-coms didn't work, but the technological applications will create a second wave that will change the world." Houston, he promises, will become the world's center of commodity trading, and he intends to be a part of it. In fact, he is already shopping for office space.
"This is the second wave, and Enron's got it," he says, almost breathless. "There are thousands of people running around the streets of Houston that get it."
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