Word: enronization
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Only now, a year later, has she begun to think of fashioning a life without Enron. In November, she left her $165,000 job. But her future is shaky. She plans to start a global consulting firm to advise company boards on governance and ethics, though CEOs privately chuckle at the thought of opening up to the gimlet-eyed Watkins. The first to speak out, Watkins has had the most time to acclimatize to her strange new existence. Unlike the FBI's Coleen Rowley and WorldCom's Cynthia Cooper, she does not shy away from describing herself as a whistle...
Such impudence, while a virtue in New York, was less appreciated when she returned to Houston in 1993 to take a job with Enron. Her mother noted the new attitude. And while Watkins rose quickly through the ranks and was thought of as whip smart, she earned an equally well-deserved reputation for lack of tact. Poised and pleasant with clients, Watkins often barreled right through her colleagues. They nicknamed her the "Buzz Saw." One boss pulled her aside and said, "Sherron, you kind of cut people off at the jugular. There they are bleeding at the neck, and then...
...time Watkins arrived, Enron was fast shedding its image as a staid natural-gas-pipeline company. Trading chief Jeffrey Skilling and his financial whiz, Andrew Fastow, wanted to build a nimble, "asset-light" firm that could exploit deregulating markets for energy, water, weather derivatives, broadband capacity and anything else that could be turned into a commodity. The strategy spawned explosive growth. By 2000, Enron was the seventh largest company in America. The '90s were fat times for Enron, and the corporate culture oozed in excess. The company rented ski condos in Beaver Creek, Colo., and stocked each with a personal...
...dial-up, the meeting proved relatively uneventful. Lay seemed composed but genuinely concerned and said he would have attorneys look into the questionable deals. Though Watkins counseled against it, Lay suggested--and eventually selected--Enron's law firm, Vinson & Elkins, to conduct the inquiry. Nevertheless, Watkins left feeling buoyed. "I felt, 'Oh, good, now he knows,'" she says. "There was a feeling that I had done the hardest thing in my life, but I had carried the torch and dropped it off." For the first time that week, she slept through the night. In late September, even after netting...
...high was short-lived. Some laid-off Enron employees began blaming Watkins for not taking her concerns to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Others fumed that in late August and October 2001, after writing her memos, Watkins unloaded $47,000 in Enron stock--moves she says were motivated by advice from her accountant and 9/11 jitters, respectively. By far the most intense criticism has centered on Watkins' decision to sell her story in book and movie deals and on the lecture circuit...