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enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

enroncorp.com

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Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#41

Post by bitwize »

bboygravity wrote: post #34
bitwize wrote: post #8

Eeeeyeah. When I'm applying for a job, if I go to their corporate site and their about us page reads like the KPMG anthem, or Weird Al's "Mission Statement", it's a huge red flag or at least it prompts followup questions. (Most annoying is when I ask the crooter followup questions and get "Did you check out their web site?" as a response. Yes, I did, and it told me nothing. Did you?) Based on that, we should've seen…

Following that logic most large companies would be about to collapse? Not saying that they aren't. Who knows. Off-topic: I'm personally just waiting for the new Bernie Madoff (Ken Griffin) to be caught sometime in the coming decades or so.

Most large companies are pretty upfront about the kinds of products and services they provide.

It's being vague or evasive about that that's the warning sign.

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#42

Post by KptMarchewa »

schneems wrote: post #12

For those who don’t know ENRON’s design still lives on in the Texas grid (serious). The Texas energy market was designed by ENRON. https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2021-07-23/heres-how-...

Works great: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/texas-p...

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#43

Post by RealityVoid »

kratom_sandwich wrote: post #31

I highly recommend Bethany McLean’s "The Smartest Guys in the Room" to read up on Enron. Also, Lucy Prebble - who is now a consultant on HBO‘s succession - has written a nice play on the matter.

I recently listened to the aquired podcast on Enron: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/enron

It's pretty long, but it's a good podcast, IMO. It also mentioned the book in it, and I think it was one of the main sources of information.

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#44

Post by bjoli »

smashed wrote: post #21
dbalatero wrote: post #9

I remember that era of using ` ` dropdowns for navigation. Phew.

It's the part of the site that worked the best on mobile for me. In fact it worked better than many hamburger menus I find on modern mobile sites. It's not the greatest UX but it's not that bad either.

It might be because it is standard. It offloads everything to the native UI, which in many situations is a good idea. I don't know how many times I have had web pages break on mobile because of some fancy date selection widget.

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#45

Post by Waterluvian »

cratermoon wrote: post #7
bombcar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zombo.com is still going, so why not Enron?

Overall, zombo.com has done better than Enron

I think a good portion of that is because of the fundamental differences in business philosophy. Enron dictated success at any cost, and that resulted in the necessity of fraud. Meanwhile, Zombo Com provided an open-ended framework for users to build their own success. Not only does this change the entire tone of their business dealings, but it cleverly offloads liability onto the user where the only limit is, in fact, themselves.

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#46

Post by version_five »

kristopolous wrote: post #29
cratermoon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, zombo.com has done better than Enron

for one, zombo.com has never caused rolling blackouts by knocking power stations offline during peak demands to juice prices. ah the beauties of deregulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...

Enron was cooking the books and collapsed because it was a criminal fraud. The power outages and whatnot were the fault of California regulators, every energy company did the same thing because it's what the poorly written laws said they could do. And regulation arbitrage was one of Enron's few legal profitable endeavors.

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#47

Post by version_five »

kratom_sandwich wrote: post #31

I highly recommend Bethany McLean’s "The Smartest Guys in the Room" to read up on Enron. Also, Lucy Prebble - who is now a consultant on HBO‘s succession - has written a nice play on the matter.

Sgitr is a great book and gives a real appreciation of how Ernon could have happened and will happen again. The perfect storm of hands off management and belief that ideas are more important than execution, plus the usual greed and slippery slope of covering small frauds with increasingly bigger ones. Other than Skilling and Fastow, they weren't all bad guys, I hope I'm never caught in a situation like that.

Also interesting is that sgitr is almost identical to "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou (sp?) about Theranos. Most of the same elements were present in that fraud.

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#48

Post by alsobrsp »

Corporate implosions of the dot-com era are fantastic reads. I was a part of the Northwestern Corporation, Expanets, Lucent fiasco. It was crazy the decisions that were made. I spec'ed a million dollar Sun Hardware purchase, my boss turned it into a $25 million 5 year, rental at a Quest DC in Denver.

We also had an entire floor of an Arthur Andersen building in Jersey where we were writing our new app. There was another floor that was off limits to anyone not a partner. A friend of mine saw trucks of document boxes come in. The paper shredders were working overtime there, we assume anyway.

Expanets didn't need to go down that way, greed and stupidity are powerful drugs.

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#49

Post by exikyut »

hedora wrote: post #14
alex_young wrote: post #11

After the dotcom crash I looked for some safe haven outside of the industry, and found a landing place at a global fiber optics networking division of an energy trading company called Dynegy. Sounded safe! A month after joining they backed out of their planned buyout of their largest competitor Enron. Apparently this Enron thing was cooking their books. Enron sued Dynegy, Dynegy countersued, and started laying people…

You might have fun poking around their mail archive: http://www.enron-mail.com/email/maggi-m/inbox/Enron_Dynegy_M... > In addition, all information, documents and communications related to the merger between Enron and Dynegy should be coordinated through and approved by Mark Muller, Lance Schuler, Robert Eickenroht, Mark Haedicke, Rob Walls or Greg Whalley of Enron. It is absolutely critical that this procedure be ma…

The (small) list of removed items is hilarious: http://www.enron-mail.com/email/removed

The other comments explaining that this is a restoration project make me wonder where this script came from. The archive of the original website?

There are more directories: http://www.enron-mail.com/email/

Re: enron :: discover the power of WHY (2001)

#50

Post by xcdzvyn »

kristopolous wrote: post #29
cratermoon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, zombo.com has done better than Enron

for one, zombo.com has never caused rolling blackouts by knocking power stations offline during peak demands to juice prices. ah the beauties of deregulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...

Enron profited from the 2000s crisis due to government regulation demanding energy distributors purchase energy at an unsustainable rate. This is documented in the "Effects of partial deregulation" heading and in the lede.
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