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Power
Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron by Mimi Swartz and
Sherron Watkins Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Living Large It’s morbid curiosity that drew me to
reading Mimi Swartz’ Enron book, Power
Failure. The fact that former Enron VP Sherron Watkins was involved
helped. It’s a fascinating tale of hubris and office politics. Here’s an
excerpt from Chapter 8, “Living Large” (pp. 133-5): You could have it all: You could take risks (but they were hedged risks,
under a huge corporate umbrella), you could be—in fact, you were supposed to
be—an intellectual (and no one called you a nerd!), and of course, you could
get really, really rich, maybe even overnight—the way it had always been in
Houston. In short, if you worked at Enron, you could embrace
the old myths in a new way: You became a brilliant risk taker who was backed
by a multibillion-dollar corporation—and the rewards were the same as they'd
always been. So, people flocked to Enron to embrace the conundrum.
There was pressure, there was abuse, there were near-psychotic levels of
competition, but everyone knew they were just a deal away from making it
really, really big. You just had to hang in there; leaving Enron would be
like a star reporter quitting The New York Times
or an honor student walking away from Harvard or a bound-for-glory baseball
player abandoning the Yankees—anything else was going to feel like a step
down. Did you want to work with average people who made average incomes and
had average ideas? Leaving Enron meant admitting that you, too, were
average—instead of being the smartest, the fastest, and the best in the
business. As the millennium approached, the company's growing
success in fact bred two Enrons. The first was the idealized Enron—the Enron
that the New York Times called "a model for the new
American workplace — every bit as much as the Silicon Valley start-ups that
usually come to mind when the subject is entrepreneurship or
innovation"—the company that routinely landed on Fortune's lists of the
most innovative and best companies to work for in America. The survey Enron
submitted to Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work for in America"
poll made Enron sound like corporate heaven: "On many of our floors the
offices have glass walls or no walls at all, even for management," the
scribes in the PR department wrote. "Nothing is hidden, secrecy is
passe." Enron was benevolent: "If employees fail, there is no time
for recrimination because they are already in hot pursuit of the next opportunity."
Enron's leaders were the kind of guys you'd want for your best friends:
"Ken, [and] Jeff, . . . clearly set the tone for how the rest of the
company operates. They are friendly, approachable and ready to listen. They
say hi in the elevator and ask how you are doing . . . they personally read
and reply to all employees' suggestions and comments and they hold open
forums for discussion at floor meetings. . . . [T]heir passion for new ideas
and ways of doing things has sparked the creativity among employees that is
building brand-new markets around the country and the world." But Enron insiders knew hype when they saw it.
Contributors to Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work for in
America" survey were supposed to be selected at random from within their
companies. But at Enron, the same executives in Human Resources and Public
Relations filled out the forms every year, creating out of thin air the
corporate oasis that annually ranked higher and higher on the business
press's laudatory lists. Eventually, Enron employees came up with a different
name for their company: The Bizarre Social Experiment. This company was
forever reorganizing, so no one ever really knew for whom they were working
or what, exactly, they were supposed to be doing. This company put ever-younger
and less-experienced people in charge of business units. This company threw
ungodly amounts of money at new business concepts. This company devoted
itself to perpetual and monumental change: As Ken Lay liked to say, "In
ten years we expect the majority of our profits to come from businesses that
we aren't even in today." Unless, of course, the market suggested you
were unfocused, and then it was time to backtrack. In other words, despite the great press, Enron was a
company enveloped in chaos. To read more about the chaos and its
aftermath, pick up Power
Failure, sit back, and be shocked by how events unfolded. Steve Hopkins, May 27, 2003 |
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ă 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the June 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Power
Failure.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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