It’s not unusual

The Financial Times has an in-depth look at the corporate culture of Enron, apparently known as the crooked E to its one-time employees. The FT reports a lot of unattractive practices, but I was struck more by how typical much of it sounded.

Certainly Enron pushed the boundaries of acceptability more than most. But consider its Performance Review Committee, which the FT looks at in detail. Managers were required to rate their employees on a scale from one to five. Those receiving fives (and the company had a bell curve to ensure a healthy number received the bottom mark) lost their jobs. Isn’t that just what the much-lauded Jack Welch thinks every company should do?

Enron employees were judged overwhelmingly on their revenue-getting ability, rather than on the alleged core values of “respect, integrity, communication and excellence”. Whatever the rhetoric about corporate values and mission statements, I’d guess that the bulk of companies in the western world (not just the US) judge preponderantly on what their employees bring to the bottom line.

The FT also gets exercised by the extent of sports gambling that was part of the Enron culture. Again, particularly a week after the conclusion of the NCAA basketball tournament, that doesn’t sound atypical.

I don’t advocate any of these practices, and Enron does seem to have been, in the FT’s words, “rotten to the core”. But the message I take from the paper’s investigation is how close to rotten many corporate cultures are today.