Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
The stock price was tanking and the company was coming unraveled -- but Chairman Ken's weekly message to workers at Enron's posh London office was, "Everything's fine." We believed him.
Jan 25, 2002 | The day of my interview I had a stomach full of butterflies and a heart full of apprehension. Since I'm not a baseball fan who'd have heard of Enron Field and energy trading isn't my calling, the name Enron rang no bells in my head when I was invited to interview for the job as a software contractor. But a quick scout around the Internet revealed a tale of a global Goliath -- a company that had quite literally come out of nowhere to dominate its sector, turn over billions of dollars and even lend a helping hand to the Bush administration from time to time. In size and structure, it was as close to Microsoft as any other company I'd come across in recent times, and in terms of the people it hired to work on its technology systems, it was the Redmond giant's equal. To a programmer, that's something that instantly sparks a mix of fear, apprehension and excitement.
Enron's London offices, which had recently won awards for being the best workplace in England, were designed to strike terror into the hearts of interview candidates and competitors. A circle of Romanesque pillars surrounded an ever-flowing waterfall, flanked on all sides by art nouveau sculptures and paintings. Overseeing them all, a huge video wall constantly ran promotional videos about Enron's activities, while at one edge of the foyer a gleaming, unused BMW Z3 enticed employees to hand over their friends and family to Ken Lay in order to enter a bimonthly raffle to win the elite sports car.
Every need of the carefully cultivated workaholic workforce was catered to. A gym, open day and night, played MTV and offered health, fitness and stress management classes. An Italian restaurant served a never-ending stream of mochas, cappuccinos, custom-made sandwiches and pasta dishes. A small convenience store supplied newspapers from around the world, as well as the usual array of high-energy junk food that every trader and programmer needs. There was even a pharmacy and dry cleaner, a post office and a place for getting your photographs developed.
In short, once you were in, Enron wanted to make sure you never ever had to leave. And for those rare occasions when you had to exit to face the family, you could buy one of the always available bunches of flowers on your way out the door.
The interview went well, although at the time it didn't feel like it. My interviewers made it clear at every opportunity that Enron employed only the very best, and they expected the world from their staff. The chap who was to ultimately become my boss was serious beyond belief, probing me with every tricky, sweat-inducing question he could find, all the while keeping a deadpan face and a monotonous drone in his voice -- no doubt the product of a sleep-deprived week spent driving new trading systems into place.
The online systems they were hiring for were the largest in the world, trading billions of dollars a day. The staff who worked on those systems were the top people in their field; their previous employers read like a who's who of the financial and information technology sectors: Deutsche Bank, RBS, Warburgs, Lehman Brothers, Microsoft, Compaq, and on and on. The systems they developed and maintained were expected to run 24/7, produce bucketloads of cash for Houston and provide solutions that would allow the traders to dominate any market they turned their attention to. Those markets include power trading, gas and metal trading, online bandwidth trading and even weather trading. If there was a way of selling something, anything, en masse, no matter how obscure, Enron would figure out how to do it and bring in the people needed to make it happen.
The nine months I spent working at Enron were probably the most exciting, intense, nerve-racking and emotional of my entire life. The company insisted that everyone fulfill their potential and use that potential to direct the company. Enron Online, the company's much-touted and massively successful online trading system, was the brainchild of one employee in Houston who gathered around her a collection of programmers to secretly develop the system after hours. Like eager puppies, they presented their finished product to the paymasters, who patted them on their backs, put the system live and transformed the company yet again.
The principle was that anyone at Enron could make a difference. Years before, Andrew Fastow, the former finance director of the company, had even openly touted a new accounting approach he was planning to use as an example of the company's innovative edge. The device, known as "off-balance-sheet financing," was the one that would eventually untangle Enron's web of internal secrecy with catastrophic results.
The company's motto, "Learn the power of why," forced everyone to question what they were doing and why they were doing it. Innovation was king. It was only a partial joke among the staff in London that the motto displayed on the huge multiscreen video in reception should instead be "Resistance is futile."
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