Subject: Visit to Enron
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 04:19:00 -0700 (PDT)

Greg and Louise,

Thanks for taking time out of  your schedule to spend some time with Alph
Bingham and me this week.  You and your team are breaking new ground in
your business with impressive speed.  We hope to match that type of
performance within e.Lilly.

I had several key takeaways that were notewothy:

1. Build your e.commerce strategy from the customer's perspective.  Louise,
you demonstrated this by the intense focus on the traders' requirements for
EnronOnline.
2. As Peter Drucker points out in his 1994 article on the "Theory of
Business", you must have clear assumptions about your environment, mission
and core competencies.  The establishment of Enron Networks seems to be
built upon your strong ability to assess a potential market for
commoditization and then leverage your strong trading capabilities and
control processes in order to create or redefine the market(eg. pulp/paper,
steel,bandwidth).
3. You provide people a chance to understand the business and be
accountable early in their career.  The example of one of your top traders
illustrated the performance-based culture that you are developing while
other examples showed the business breadth that is provided to key talent.
4. In the new economy (probably in the old one, too), there is no defense,
only offense.  Again, that mantra seems to grow out of a strong bias for
action within Enron Networks as you recognize that you must re-create
yourself (Online gas market) and move aggressively into new ones.
5. Louise, your EnronOnline initiative epitomized the phrase:  "Ask for
forgiveness, not for permission."  In other words, get it done; get it done
right, and the little things - like the budget - will take care of
themselves.

Let me know if we can ever return the favor.  Greg, we may want to discuss
a few risk management questions with you sometime in the future as we are
building some innovative discovery research ventures that would benefit
from your insight in this area.

Thanks again for your time.  Please thank Liz Taylor for us as well.  She
was very helpful.

Regards,

Newt Crenshaw