Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins, left, and former Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling are sworn in on Capitol Hill Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2002, prior to testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Enron. Watkins' attorney, Philip Hilder, sits at left, Skilling's attorney, Bruce Hiler, sits at center. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds). (RON EDMONDS / AP)
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Surrounded by Miami Dolphins memorabilia and members of the French media, former Enron employee Robert Smoot, lower left, watches Sherron Watkins testify before Congress Thursday, Feb. 14, 2002, at his home in League City, Texas. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan) (PAT SULLIVAN / AP)
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Sherron Watkins, Vice-President of Enron, center, listens to the testimony of Jeffrey Skilling, right, February 26, 2002 on Capitol Hill. (KRT) (CHUCK KENNEDY / KRT)
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MAGAZINE COVER - TIME MAGAZINE. Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Sherron Watkins of Enron appear on the December 30, 2002, cover of Time Magazine's "Persons of theYear" issue, called "The Whistleblowers," released Saturday, Dec. 21, 2002, ini New York. The magazine's editors chose Coleen Rowley, Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins "for believing, really believing, that the truth is one thing that must not be moved off the books, and for stepping in to make sure that it wasn't." (AP Photo/Time Magazine, Gregory Heisler). (GREGORY HEISLER / AP)
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Prosecution witness Sherron Watkins, left, testifies in the fraud and conspiracy trial of former Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, right, in this courtroom sketch Wednesday, March 15, 2006 in Houston. (AP Photo/Pat Lopez) (PAT LOPEZ / AP)
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3/15/2006--Sherron Watkins, former VP of corporate development at Enron and a witness for the prosecution departed at the end of day 26, Wednesday in the seventh week, of the fraud and conspiracy trial of former Enron execs Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, at the Bob Casey United States Court House in Houston. Photo by Steve Ueckert / Houston Chronicle (Steve Ueckert / Houston Chronicle)
For Sherron Watkins, telling the story of Enron’s downfall never seems to get old.
The former Enron vice president who tried to warn other top executives of flaws in the company’s accounting has since been traveling the world to talk about Enron, ethics and leadership to trade groups and corporate executives.
With Houston writer Mimi Swartz, Watkins co-authored Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron and was named one of Time’s Persons of the Year in 2002.
In the middle of the decade, she thought the story had grown stale and started talking about other topics, but audiences still wanted to hear about the fallen energy giant.
She compares the company’s collapse to a car wreck that passers-by can’t help slowing down to observe.
“People want to know the lessons learned and that it can’t happen to them, but there’s also still the fascination of what was a giant implosion,” she said.
She has spoken to audiences from Mauritius to Switzerland and all across the U.S., and they’re not always comforted by what she has to say. She tells them Enron wasn’t full of crooks but people who took a slow creep toward the edge of a cliff.
“They want to believe it was just full of bad people, but that’s just not the case,” she said.
While Enron’s implosion and her unique role, which she refers to as “speaking truth to power,” have landed her a steady flow of speaking gigs to pay the bills, the experience also solidified her Christian faith.
She’s taking religious classes and has joined the board of Serenity Retreat for Healing and Spiritual Renewal, where she is studying Theophostic Prayer, a method of treating emotional difficulties that she hopes to use to help victims of sex trafficking.
Maybe her New Found Faith will help her find the “whole truth and nothing but the truth.” She’s made a career, literally, of telling an incomplete version to date.
Sherron: You have done a good job spinning the “whistleblower” persona for the lecture circuit gig and I am sure it is better than seaonal work at H&R Block. Did you think up that strategy on your own or did your lawyer? As columnist Dan Ackman wrote in 2002, a whistleblower blows a whistle to call the police when the bank is being robbed. But all Sherron Watkins did “was write a memo to the bank robber (Kenneth Lay) suggesting he was about to be caught and warning him to watch out.”
I am embarrased that I grew up in the same area of NW Houston as you and also graduated from UT Austin at the same time. You obviously missed the management ethics training in the UT Business school in the late 70s, oh I forgot that was not required for sorority girls.
Maybe her New Found Faith will help her find the “whole truth and nothing but the truth.” She’s made a career, literally, of telling an incomplete version to date.
By her own admission, she engaged in insider trading. She should be in jail.
Sherron: You have done a good job spinning the “whistleblower” persona for the lecture circuit gig and I am sure it is better than seaonal work at H&R Block. Did you think up that strategy on your own or did your lawyer? As columnist Dan Ackman wrote in 2002, a whistleblower blows a whistle to call the police when the bank is being robbed. But all Sherron Watkins did “was write a memo to the bank robber (Kenneth Lay) suggesting he was about to be caught and warning him to watch out.”
I am embarrased that I grew up in the same area of NW Houston as you and also graduated from UT Austin at the same time. You obviously missed the management ethics training in the UT Business school in the late 70s, oh I forgot that was not required for sorority girls.