Word: enronizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...relaxed enough to give the Representatives a taste of her piercing Texas wit. But her square jaw clenched whenever she spoke about her feelings for the company. She firmly indicted several top executives, yet she insisted that Lay was a "man of integrity." And she spoke almost wistfully of Enron's "electric" atmosphere, of people "energized to change the world." It was Valentine's Day, and she was still very much in love...
...months afterward, Watkins faithfully went to work each day. In the absence of any real assignments, she could only bear witness to all that she had wrought, looking on as Enron auctioned off everything down to the sign at its headquarters (price: $44,000) and as the firm's esteemed accountants, Arthur Andersen, went down in their own wave of scandal...
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...