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Journalism of Courage
Rebecca Mark is an electric personality in more ways than one. Well, that’s putting it with Indian politeness and gentility. Some Americans refer to her by that gratuitously sexist term “power babe”. It is a double entendre that conveys male chauvinism replete with envy. As the high-flying executive of Enron Corporation, Mark is one of the most authoritative and strikingly successful businesswomen in the United States. And in an energy industry dominated by white males, she is a rare woman who had made her way to the top.
The story of her spectacular climb in the US corporate world is so singularly instructive that Fortune magazine put her on cover in 1996 in what the editors confessed at the outset was a ‘politically incorrect’ story on “Women, Sex, and Power”. And among American corporate czars, it is not unusual to hear some beached whales (failed males) bitching about “Mark the Shark”. To flog that inevitable pun, the woman has made quite a Mark.
Early this month, as Enron cranked up itsturbines to produce the first experimental watt of power from the Dabhol Power Project, the glow on Mark’s face could be seen from Mumbai, Maharashtra, to Houston, Texas, where the company’s corporate headquarters is located. More than any other venture, Enron’s India project was a test case, both for American corporate frontier spirit (because it had invested so little for so long in India) and India’s new liberalisation regime coming out of years of dark age socialism.
Dabhol is Enron’s biggest foreign venture. It is also the single largest foreign investment in India. Rebecca Mark, a dazzling woman in her 40s, was Enron’s — and corporate America’s — torchbearer. Her success in shepherding the project though a turbulent political and bureaucratic maze has further won her plaudits from the US corporate world, catapulting her last May to vice-president of Enron Corp. “Quite a journey for a simple farm girl, hey?” she laughed in an interview last week in which she spoke of her pastoral upbringing,eclectic education, and corporate ascent.
Rebecca’s journey began on a family farm in Missouri where generations of Marks had tilled land and tended livestock. Second of four children, she says she broke the mould, taking to books and new languages from a young age. She put herself through school. When she was still in her teens, her strictly Baptist parents reluctantly sent her to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, a place made famous many years later by the mad evangelist David Koresh.
“They thought I’d be much safer in a conservative town,” Mark recalls. She graduated with a psychology degree, wanting initially to be a clinical psychologist. But she changed course and in 1978 entered a bank training programme at a Houston bank which lent money to big energy companies. In 1982, she joined Continental Resources, a natural gas outfit that later became part of Enron.
Even as a junior executive she made quite a splash at Enron. A tall, striking honey-blond with sparkling brown eyes, she was aware andconfident of her good looks. Nor did she make any apologies about using her femininity as a professional asset. Then and now, she dresses to kill, having given up long ago the formal female corporate attire. “What I am trying to prove?” she once asked. “That I can look like a man? That I don’t like being a woman?” (She also drives to thrill. In her stable of cars currently is a ruby red Jaguar XK8 convertible).
Houston’s corporate world was soon aflame with bazaar gossip about her relationship with John Wing, a Vietnam vet who was one of Enron’s key honchos. It was under Wing’s tutelage, the story goes, that Mark learnt the ropes. He was her Svengali. He berated her in public, taught her tactics, and made her a corporate toughie. Mark laughs away talk of her being a corporate femme fatale, saying rumours of her exciting life have always been exaggerated. “It always happens when one is young, attractive, and successful.”
She was married at that time but by around 1985 it was coming apart. A mother oftwins, she divorced and took the courageous decision to opt for a sabbatical to do an MBA at Harvard. From all accounts, she was a brilliant student even as she juggled with motherhood and a career at Enron, where she still worked as a consultant. When she returned full time to Enron, she straightaway began rocketing to the top. Wing was leaving Enron and she replaced him as head of the power plant development unit.
Enron at that time was a fairly insular American company with little international interests. In 1991, Mark persuaded chairman Ken Lay to create a separate company to pursue foreign markets, especially in the Third World, where there was a burgeoning need for power. The biggest item in Enron’s foreign portfolio was the Dabhol Power Project in Maharashtra.
But from Day One, it was dogged by controversy. Rumours of underhand deals, mendacity, and obfuscation swirled around the $ 2.4 billion project. Enron itself did not help with a pushy, in-your-face attitude that dissed local leaders, opinionmakers, and plain old people who lived on the land the project was to be built. It was the typical Ugly American syndrome. Still, the company managed to railroad the project which many considered too pricey and too unsound with what critics said was some heavy handed American huckstering. Says Mark of those days, “We were so different. We came into a socialist, centralised system where every private face was suspect.”
But just when it looked like the project would start rolling there was a change of government in Maharashtra and the new Shiv Sena dispensation kiboshed the deal. Enron was furious and threatened a lawsuit. The Sena hounds retaliated with their own legal threats. For months, there was a tense stand-off. What followed was a lesson that will probably constitute a chapter in American textbooks on international corporate strategies.
Mark first set about winning the trust and confidence of the Sena supremo Bal Thackeray. Hearing about his background as a cartoonist, she presented him with avideotape of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. She then took to wearing Indian clothes, giving up her snazzy designer clothes in India for salwar kameezes and ghaghra cholis. Sanjay Bhatnagar, a Harvard graduate, was appointed to head the Indian operation.
On the ground, the company changed tack, working on telling the locals about the jobs they would create and promising to improve local health and environment. And in some deft number-crunching revisions, the company also lowered the project costs while bagging expanded contracts. End result: Mark won the project back for Enron.
Early this month, as the project headed for fruition with power expected to be produced commercially any time now, Mark celebrated with gala parties in Mumbai and Delhi, wearing gold brocaded Rajasthani dresses. “They were the happiest days in my corporate life,” she gushed. Although the project is still not beyond controversy (a US human rights report recently criticised the project and there have always been questions about theEnron’s power being too expensive), Mark is confident she has cracked the Indian market.
Confident enough to bag a Phase Two for the project when current wisdom is Maharashtra has more power now than it needs. Back in energy circles, rumours are already crackling that she may some day soon succeed Ken Lay as Enron’s top dog. That may be awhile, but for now Enron’s dog days seem to be over.
