What If You'd Worked at Enron?

It wasn't just that working at Enron was hectic, or demanding, or urgent. What made working at Enron different was that it was intoxicating. It took otherwise unglamorous work -- scheduling natural-gas pipelines, developing electricity pricing models, managing a fiber-optic network -- and gave it a powerful sense of mission.

Phyllis Anzalone was the first person Enron dispatched to California in 1996 to sell electricity as a retail commodity. The opportunity, she says, "lit me on fire. It was like a drug."

Helena Payne worked for 24 years at Enron and its predecessor, Houston Natural Gas. She liked the company so much that she recruited her daughter Rebekah Rushing to work there. Rushing, an administrative assistant, adopted the work ethic of an executive. Last summer, she took her laptop on her family vacation to Lake Tahoe, and she worked three of the five days she was there.

Charles Weiss left a 19-year career at Sprint to join Enron in March 2001 -- for a job that lasted just 9 months. "The risk," Weiss says, "was not going to Enron and not having the chance to fulfill my aspirations."

Steve Kromer worked for 10 years to become an energy-conservation expert before he joined Enron. "For an energy-efficiency nut," says Kromer, "Enron was nirvana."

But even as Enron inspired these employees, there were things about the company that didn't add up.

Helena Payne reviewed and reimbursed Enron corporate expense accounts. For years, she and her fellow "accounting ladies" found themselves authorizing reimbursement for employees who they were sure had paid for prostitutes.

And Steve Kromer always had the sense that for his boss's bosses, "If the idea was great enough, it didn't matter whether you ever actually did it. It was more like, 'Let's book $3 trillion in revenue and move on.' "

During Enron's unraveling, the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history, most attention has been focused on two places: the deception, greed, and malfeasance at the top and the financial victims at the bottom.

But life at Enron, as at most companies, was lived in the middle. Not too far from the top, not too far from the bottom, a battalion of familiar white-collar employees worked every day, their lives consumed, brightened, then betrayed by Enron.

What follows are snapshots of the worlds of five ex-Enroners, people who can explain, How did the company inspire such passion? People willing to answer the question, Were there any hints of the problems that brought Enron down? And people who can help us answer the single most important question of all: What would you have done if you had worked at Enron?

Phyllis Anzalone: The True Believer

How badly did Phyllis Anzalone want to work for Enron? In January 1996, at the start of energy deregulation, she interviewed with two Enron executives and issued an ultimatum: "I said, 'You can either hire me or compete against me.' "

What did working at Enron do for Anzalone? For one thing, it made her a lot of money, so much that the company's failure cost her about $1 million. More important, it made her. It took her from being a reasonably successful facilities-management salesperson from rural Louisiana and propelled her into the ranks of sales superstars. It changed her view of herself; it confirmed what she thought she could achieve. "Enron had a profound effect on my life," she says. "As devastating as it was, I'm glad I did it. It was like being on steroids every day."

And what does Anzalone think of the executives who ran Enron -- and then ran it into the ground? "They are scum," she says. "They are crooks, and they are traitors. They betrayed many people's trust, including mine. Jeff Skilling is lying. Every single employee at Enron knows he's lying."

All of which makes Anzalone a true believer. "Working for Enron was a commitment," she says. "I worked my ass off."

Four months after Enron hired her, Anzalone went to San Francisco to crack California's retail-electricity market. She was an "originator" -- she "originated," or sold, energy-supply contracts. "I concentrated on Silicon Valley and health care. Those were critical operating environments that used a lot of energy," Anzalone says. "My goal was to show businesses how they could improve on the 'do nothing' position. That was our biggest competitor -- companies who decided to do nothing, to just keep getting electricity from the utility."

Eventually, she had Applied Materials, Sutter Health, and all of Kaiser Permanente's sprawling California facilities among her customers. "It was a brand-new industry doing things that had never been done before. It was the most fun I've ever had."

Anzalone was offering customers a seemingly simple proposition: a fixed rate for electricity, going out two, five, even six years, priced 5% below regulated rates. In fact, the sales were extremely complex. The price was based on consumption in 15-minute increments. The contracts were 3 inches thick. "No one understood those contracts," says Anzalone, "not even me."