In October and November 2001, two company-wide communications captured the final weeks of institutional Enron. The first ordered employees to destroy their emails. The second told them the holiday party was off. The emails survived because employees ignored the order. The party did not.
“There Will Be No Exceptions”: The Email Retention Policy
Three days after publishing a survey in which employees questioned the company’s integrity, Enron Global Technology sent a reminder about email retention policy to all North American employees. The date was October 5, 2001.
The memo appeared in 28 mailboxes across the corpus. Within 13 minutes of it being sent, Stephanie Harris forwarded it to the office of James Derrick, Enron’s General Counsel. Legal was in the loop before the average employee had finished reading it.
On October 23, IT began automated enforcement. Jimmy Manguba from Enron Desktop Support sent the notice:
Eight days later, on October 31, the SEC opened its formal investigation.
Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditor, would be convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding Enron-related documents during this same window. The retention policy email itself became evidence. And the corpus it ordered destroyed – 1.23 million messages across more than 150 employee mailboxes – was released by FERC and became the single most studied corporate email dataset in the history of information science.
The emails survived because employees did not comply. Every message in this wiki exists because someone ignored the policy, or because the automated deletion hadn’t reached their mailbox yet, or because they had, in fact, copied things onto floppy disks and zip disks and CDs and the network. The prohibited actions became the preservation mechanism.
“Given What Has Transpired”: The Holiday Party, Canceled
On November 1, 2001, Theresa Staab in pipeline operations in Colorado sent an email with the subject line “Xmas Party”:
She wanted a hotel room. She and her husband were going to make a night of it. The party was scheduled for December 8.
The same day, in Omaha, Mike McGowan was thinking bigger:
A company plane. For a regional Christmas party. In November 2001.
Eighteen days after Staab asked about hotel rates, on November 19 at 9:34 PM – a Monday evening, the timing of crisis management rather than routine communications – Ken Lay sent the cancellation to the entire company:
The email hit 97 mailboxes. It is one of the most widely distributed messages in the corpus.
Twenty-two minutes later, at 9:56 PM, Danny McCarty sent his regrets to Omaha:
“As you probably guessed.” The company had lost 90% of its stock value. The SEC was investigating. The CEO had just told 20,000 employees that a holiday party would be “imprudent.” And McCarty, a senior executive, responded in 22 minutes with the most measured sentence in the corpus. Yes, they had probably guessed.
Thirteen days later, Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Theresa Staab never needed that hotel room.
See Also
- Ken Lay – Chairman who ordered the retention policy and canceled the party
- James Derrick – General Counsel whose office received the retention memo within 13 minutes
- Stanley Horton – Invited to the Omaha Christmas party by company plane
- David Duncan – Arthur Andersen’s lead auditor, later convicted for document destruction
- Lay It on the Line – The employee survey that preceded both of these emails
- Everything Is Fine – Lay’s all-company reassurance emails during the same period
- Enron Bankruptcy – Filed December 2, 2001