Rank & Yank

Rank & Yank og litt om Andy Fastow

"Darwinistisk" bedriftsmodell brukt blant annet av Enron. Går ut på at et selskap årlig, og uavhengig av årsresultat, sier opp de ti prosentene av arbeiesstokken som har "levert svakest", mens de "beste ti prosentene" rykker tilsvarende opp i lønn.


Andy: Skillings kreative finansdirektør

In the company's fat days, Fastow earned a reputation as a money wizard who constructed the complex financial vehicles that Enron drove on the road to explosive growth. Skilling wanted an "asset-light" company that could rapidly exploit deregulating markets for energy, water, broadband capacity and anything else that could be traded. So beginning in 1993, Fastow created hundreds of "special-purpose entities" designed to transfer Enron's debt to an outside company and get it off the books--without giving up control of the assets that stood behind the debt.

The challenge for Enron was to enter the burgeoning deregulated energy markets without sacrificing its credit rating by carrying too much debt on the books. So Fastow got creative. He tripled his staff, to more than 100, hiring various banking experts and giving them the task of selling and buying capital risk. "They were all young kids, 28 to 32, with great pedigrees, and they started coming up with these fancy derivatives," says Houston lawyer Tom Bilek, who interviewed dozens of former Fastow associates before suing Enron's management. "But Fastow was the boy genius setting all these SPEs up."


http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,201871-1,00.html