Wombat Diet

I’ve just finished reading ENRON An Anatomy of Greed by Brian Cruver. The Unshredded Truth from an Enron Insider. I chanced on a paperback copy in the university library yesterday and I ended up reading it almost straight through.

It was an interesting, entertaining and, at times, a laugh out loud funny tale, told with some self-deprecating humour. Cruver was there for the last year as a relatively new MBA thinking, at first, that he’d reached a serious organization. It was all the more enjoyable for my having worked for a couple of organizations that imploded — one not long after I left, having seen the writing on the wall.

Dying organizations exist in parallel universes that are fascinating to observe. So many heightened emotions and behaviours are on display, from the noble to the venal and sometimes worse: hope, despair, gallows humour, hubris, gossip, propaganda, rage, rats jumping, sabotage, vengeance… and many more. I had a few flashes of déjà vu reading this. For example, there’s the moment when people start liberating things. Happily, I have yet to experience the moment when people start shredding things.

The increased business focus on good governance and risk management had a significant impact on my last job. So far, however, I haven’t seen any impact of Enron on my MBA course. Ethics hasn’t been on the agenda yet. In some ways the idea that it should be on the agenda at all seems a little worrying. Nevertheless, I confess I felt a pang of envy when a friend taking an MBA at the next door London School of Business and I were comparing notes about courses.

One of his finance courses was, essentially, a master class in the forensic examination of financial statements for dead bodies and dirty tricks of every kind. The course was given and taken with a very clear understanding that this knowledge had a double-edged nature. My own financial education seemed a little run of the mill by comparison. The nearest I got to any Aha! moments was a book, serendipitously discovered, by an accountant who revealed certain tricks of the trade to a lay readership. Smaller beer, but it did add interest if not excitement.

Cruver’s tale is told in diary form, with a daily stock price and trading volume and a pithy quote for each chapter. He was nowhere near the centre of power, so it’s not a fly-on-the-wall documentary from the executive suite nor a detailed analysis of executive malfeasance, so much as a roller-coaster ride with some PJ O’Rourke-style gags. Most enjoyable were those surreal moments as things are en route to hell in a handbasket and after which people ask themselves: “Did that really happen?” My favourite:

…I watched as Lay stepped to the podium with a handful of question cards submitted by the impatient Enronians.

“I would like to know,” Lay began reading, “if you are on crack. If so, that would explain a lot. If not, you may want to start because it’s going to be a long time before we trust you again.”

A sharp silence; then a few barely audible laughs–the nervous kind–came from the crowd. You could hear the thud of a thousand jaws dropping to the floor. Someone had just asked the chairman and CEO of a $100 billion corporation if he was on crack!

I doubt those who lost their life savings and retirement funds found headings like “Great Moments in the History of Paper Shredding” all that funny, but sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Cruver recounts his discovery one day that a razor-sharp fellow MBA of his acquaintance who started on the same day as him had bailed out, having decided that Enron didn’t meet his expectations. The “What I am doing still here?” feeling is one I have experienced, though unlike Cruver I didn’t stick it out to the end — of a badly run, not a corrupt organization. I am glad he did. It’s a story that needed telling and will remain interesting for a long time.

There’s no small connection between Enron and the other defining event of 2001: 9/11. Enron’s ties to the Bush administration could hardly have been closer. I hope that story will be told some day.

Tags: Business, History, Misc