Kohli, who hails from Delhi, followed the path of many bright young people to the Indian Institutes of Technology. He then went on to Cornell University on a scholarship. But instead of engineering, he found a better fit with energy management — and then he found Enron.
“I was in (Washington) D.C. consulting, and I said, ‘Who is this crazy company that wants to put a power plant in India?’ But as I followed the project over the years, I was amazed Enron was able to do what they did. They did what I thought was impossible.” Kohli speaks with genuine affection toward Enron and the Dabhol Power Co., despite the demise of one and the fracturing of the other.
He is not bitter — although he can be cutting in his remarks — and he often slips into the “we” pronoun when referring to Enron. He speaks of his seven and a half years with the company as an idyll in a corporate Camelot; and, like Geneviere, he sees the folly that brought the downfall.
Kohli was everything Enron wanted: brilliant, international, well groomed and articulate. They hired him in 1994 and rotated him through the associate pool, where he learned international strategy and power marketing. He ended up in Enron Global Services, which oversaw the Dabhol Power Co., an ambitious energy plant on the western coast of Maharashtra that was to be the shining example of foreign investment in emerging markets.
For years he jetted back and forth from India to Houston, working on various aspects of restructuring Enron’s contracts with the Maharashtra State Electric Board. He served as vice-president of development of phase two and oversaw commercial operations.
But, like Enron itself, the promise turned out to be too good to be true. In January 2001 he came back to Houston for good. Phase two was never finished, and within a few months all parties involved in the project were threatening to close it down. “If it was a failure,” says Kohli, “it was because of a lack of focus by Enron and a lack of management experience by India.”
Kohli puts blame on both sides, as do most energy experts. But he adds that Enron failed to marry itself with its host country; instead, it tried to plop down a little bit of American corporate culture in Asia. In the end, he felt that the thing that drew him to Enron — its international focus — was cast aside in favor of energy trading. “It was a Houstonian company looking to be international, with a mind-set that never went beyond the U.S.”
So he returned for good to his home in Houston’s historic Heights area, with his wife and new baby daughter. Unfortunately, within months the Enron structure itself would come crumbling down.
“I lost all of my 401(k), and everything that was in stocks is zero,” he says. But Kohli misses more than that. “Absolutely I was making a lot of money, and the money was nice. But I really liked the job. It was the feeling of making a positive difference, and I miss that.”
Kohli can joke about his salt-and-pepper hair, saying “I didn’t have a single gray hair before I went to Dabhol,” in one breath, and in the next he will tell you that any other company he works for he wants to be as close to management as possible so he knows “what the hell is going on.”
And he may actually be the management of his next company.
John Elder is an entrepreneur who has started, by his own estimate, a lot of companies. But the one that may have the largest impact is a nonprofit incubator he founded after Enron’s demise. “Enron’s employees were its greatest asset,” says Elder, whose newest venture, Resource Alliance Group of Houston, is helping ex-Enroners start new businesses. The idea is to provide office space, professional services and mentoring at no charge to entrepreneurs like Kohli. Elder thinks Kohli’s ideas have merit and he also finds him to be kind and gracious to work with. “Which has been a pleasure,” he says, implying that not all of Enron’s ex’s have been so positive.
So instead of being negative, Kohli and a partner are busy structuring a company that will market India’s software to American companies. “It’s not a new idea, but we are looking at having closer ties,” says Kohli.
He adds that he has learned the lessons of Enron and Dabhol well and will use them in his new venture, which should be ready to move into the funding phase in two to four months.
He has found the American contacts through the incubator to be extremely helpful, something that can counter the Enron fallout. “We’ve been getting a lot of bad press, and it hurts the people with genuine experience. It’s not by accident that somebody reinvents the energy business. Maybe the model wasn’t 100 percent, but it’s not all flawed.”
In the end, Kohli sums up his Enron experience with a quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Idylls of a King.”
As the rest of the knights of the Round Table lie dead on the battlefield, the remaining Sir Bedivere beseeches the dying Arthur for guidance in the wake of the end of Camelot: “The old order changeth, yielding place to the new, / And God fulfills himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
The legend and lessons of Enron, like Camelot, will linger for a very, very long time.
si
