Word: enronizing
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June is nail-biting time at Enron Corp., a Texas energy and trading giant, at which managers assemble twice a year to evaluate and cull employees as if they were head of cattle. Wrangling behind closed doors for up to two days at a time, the bosses compare and contrast the performance of workers over the prior six months and rate them on a five-point scale, with the top 5% designated "superior" and the bottom 15% labeled "needs improvement." In between are "excellent" (30%), "strong" (30%) and "satisfactory" (20%). You don't want to be in the cellar: anyone...
...Critics protest that forced ranking can be harsh and arbitrary. But that hasn't kept a growing number of companies from joining such firms as Enron, Ford Motor and Microsoft in adopting them. "What it all boils down to is who is in the room fighting for you," says an Enron worker who was cut from the herd. "I didn't have people there to talk for me, and I felt like I got screwed." Counters Craig Taylor, a manager in Enron's commodity-trading department: "You have to know where you stand, and I believe the system does...
...Ranking and yanking is nothing new at Enron, which launched the system among its fiercely competitive wholesale-energy traders a decade ago and has since expanded it to cover all the Houston-based company's 18,000 employees. In a typically intense session, as many as 25 managers may gather around a conference table in a windowless room with a computer screen filled with employee rankings projected on one wall. Each participant comes armed with notebooks bulging with job reviews. As the discussion proceeds, the managers may shift people from one ranking to another, deciding their fate with the click...
...important to realize that the industry is not monolithic. Enron, for example, which has close ties to the Bush administration, is heavily invested in natural gas, and they're member of the Pew Foundation, which means they sign onto the science of global warming and the search for ways of meeting the Kyoto targets. BP has a heavy investment in energy alternatives. There's a lot of support in industry for doing something reasonable to address climate change. Industry is not that reluctant to sign on as long as the playing field is level. It's difficult for Ford...
None of this matters to real Houston lovers, of course. They're just interested in bragging rights. After a bad decade, they're beginning to sound like the biggest and the best in Texas again. "Boomlet?" says Laura Schwartz, spokeswoman at Enron. "It's more than a mini-boom. It's a boom...