Remora

Enron, oh the burden of my song. As our readers have come to expect, Limited Inc possesses a Grudge-holder's hollow heart and it fills with bile and glee when our enemies (who generally, and puzzlingly, don't know who we are) tumble.

What is impressive, however, about the fall of Enron is how few mea culpas are floating around in the biz press. The excellent thing about doing journalism in America is that you can rely on your readership for 100% amnesia. If you announce the second coming of Christ is incarnate in the CEO of Behemoth Inc, and Behemoth turns out to have encouraged its accounting department to sleep with the seven mortal sins, well, nobody is going to hold you to your original turbo-charged prose. It's all spin.

So to put the current chaos in Houston in perspective, we provide this link to IndustryWeek.This 1998 profile of the company and its leader is shot through with that strange vocabulary of biz uplift. In particular, the idea that CEO's are visionaries is one uninvestigated by anthropologists, but seriously in need of study. Boss, gotta say, visionary is a strange vocation. It makes you wonder what would happen if a CEO literally started seeing visions -- in other words, went down the whacky path. Would anyone notice? Having a vision used to be the privilege of poets and prophets. The Rothschilds, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts did not consider themselves visionaries, and would have been rather offended at being compared to a bunch of scrawny madmen seeing wheels of fire in Jerusalem, or feeling compelled by the Jehovah to sleep with trollops. It would be a fine subject for some socio-linguistics student to trace the root of the visionary metaphor into the Yankee biz-olect. Although is it a metaphor? Certainly in this Ken Lay profile, we are to believe that Enron, like the Mormon church, was built upon a literal blooming of vision in the New World:

"Kenneth L. Lay, the hard-driving chairman and CEO of Enron Corp. He keeps setting visions for the Houston-based energy conglomerate that are appropriately both long-term and tough. But then to everyone's surprise, including Wall Street's, he overruns them in astonishingly short periods of time.

At Enron, the long-term has merged seamlessly into the short-term. Right now, Lay is leading Enron through its third vision in only 10 years, having quickly surpassed two previous ones. The current version, adopted in 1995, calls for Enron to become no less than "the leading energy company in the world."

It's third vision in only 10 years? Perhaps companies that proceed by vision instead of the more humble business plan should be suspect anyway.