At Enron, "The Environment Was Ripe for Abuse"

At Enron Corp., they called her "the Weather Babe." Lynda R. Clemmons, a French and history major from Southern Methodist University, was supposed to be emblematic of the rebels in Enron's freewheeling culture. In 1997, as a 27-year-old gas-and-power trader, she launched an esoteric enterprise in weather derivatives. Within two years, her startup had written $1 billion in weather hedges to protect companies against short-term spikes in the price of power during heat waves and cold snaps.

Clemmons' story made the rounds, from a favorable Harvard Business School case study to The New York Times business section, where she was pictured in black leather on a Harley-Davidson. She was, after all, a product of what Enron's culture was supposed to be all about: smart, sassy, creative, and risk-taking. And Enron made the most of her business, trumpeting weather derivatives as yet another high-potential deregulated market.