Cindy Olson visits Fraud Busting. She rose through the ranks at Enron to become the head of Human Resources. We talk culture, fraud, ethics and how it all led to collapse. Now she’s helping companies prevent the same thing from happening to them.
The white paper she refers to is at this link Enron: The Collapse of a Culture
Traci Brown: Cindy, thank you so much for coming on Fraud Busting. It’s great to be reconnected with you. How’s everything going?
Cindy Olson: Great, Traci. Thank you for having me. I’m excited.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea. Because we were just talking. It’s been what, three or four years since we met in Memphis at the Project Manager’s Institute. I gave a keynote and you did a keynote. I was just fascinated by yours. We didn’t get enough of a chance to chat because I think you had to go catch a plane and I was on later. I’m just thrilled that we have this opportunity to reconnect here.
Cindy Olson: I agree. I totally agree with you.
Traci Brown: Yea. Tell us, because you were with Enron, and Enron is just such a . . . It has a lasting impact in people’s minds. I think because of everything that went on from the rise to the fall, to the headlines. You were in the C suite there. Why don’t you let us know, what was your job? What did you do? Then we’ll get into maybe some juice details about even what you’re still discovering now about this whole situation because it was about 20 years ago.
Cindy Olson: It was. We’re coming up on the 20-year anniversary of the actual bankruptcy filing. What’s interesting, it continues to be a topic of discussion. It’s so crazy to me that 20 years later we’re still talking about Enron and John Emshwiller who was the original Wall Street Journal reporter that covered Enron back in the day, he’s reconnected with me, and they’re getting ready to do a whole podcast around Enron 20 years later. Why did he reconnect with me? Let me tell you my background. I was actually living in Omaha, Nebraska, working for InterNorth in Omaha, Nebraska when Enron and InterNorth merged. It was actually InterNorth that bought Houston Pipeline to create Enron, but Ken Lay became the CEO of the entire company. Ultimately, most people moved to Houston because that was the headquarters. I always like to say I was there before Enron was Enron because I was there for about five years prior to Enron being formed from that merger. Then I moved to Houston early on. As you can imagine a company that was formed with a lot of mergers and acquisitions, because that’s what we became. Enron was formed by bringing five pipeline systems together and a producing company and a processing company. There were a lot of transformation to do. I was actually used as a transformational leader in many of the backroom functions for 20 something years. I learned, I would say, from the best because McKinsey was our consultant of choice, and I went alongside McKinsey. They were the ones that usually had the strategy and the vision, and then I helped implement as a leader of the groups that were being transformed. In 1997, I took the lead of Enron Capital and Trade, and by that time, Skilling had come to Enron as McKinsey consultant and started reforming Enron. I was leading the back office of Enron Capital and Trade. We had the risk management books and all that. Then Lay came to me late that year and asked me if I would come to corporate. I was in the organization on the asset side of the business first, and then I was in Enron Capital and Trade, which was the new side of our business which was more about intellectual capital, and then I ended up going to corporate to work directly for Lay, first running community relations and then ultimately I ran the culture committee, diversity, and then I asked for HR in 1999.
Traci Brown: Oh wow.
Cindy Olson: And they gave it to me. They put me on the executive committee, so I was one of the top 20 at that point. So why did I ask for HR? It was clear to me that as we were creating Enron, and by the way, by that time we had been named the most innovative company by Fortune I think five years in a row. It was clear that we were an intellectual capital company. We were not asset based anymore. It fact, Jeff’s long-term strategy was to sell the assets, and we became a trading house, similar to, I always say, similar to GE because GE started out being an asset company and ultimately GE Capital became one of the biggest divisions of General Electric. We were a lot like that. That’s why we were the most innovative company for six years in a row. I would say that John Emshwiller of the Wall Street Journal contacted me because I’m in a unique situation. I was there for 23 years. I was on the asset side. I was in the new business, and then ultimately worked at corporate, particularly human resources at the end of Enron’s life. I’m the highest-ranking Enron executive that had had all that experience, that varied experience that stayed the longest, that was there the longest, except for Lay, and of course, Ken Lay is not with us any longer. Anyway, so that’s my background. I pretty much know a lot about not only Enron’s business but what really was going on and the company and how we created our culture. I love to talk about it because it was a company that was pretty incredible.
Traci Brown: Let’s do talk about that because in this podcast, especially with what we have going on right now, because at the time we’re recording this, we’re starting to get back to work. The culture is key to preventing fraud. I’m so curious about the culture at Enron because there ended up being quite a bit of fraud. I don’t know if that was baked into the culture or a result of innovation. I watched the, I think I told you, The Smartest Guys in the Room, and they talked about some of the culture there as being like really aggressive and even they called it the rank and yank of the HR system. I’m sure you’ve heard of that. Why don’t you speak to that a little bit? What was your idea of what was going on? What were you trying to create?
Cindy Olson: I love it when people say that they’ve watched The Smartest Guys in the Room because my response to that is there were three things wrong with that. One, the people that were in that documentary and that were speaking, right, were not at the top of Enron, because all of us at the top of Enron at that time were told by our attorneys to keep quiet. Honestly, most people have kept quiet for all these years, I mean, because it was such a traumatic experience. The people that were actually talking about Enron and were at Enron weren’t at the top of the company. The second thing that I didn’t really like about it is because it really does make you think that there was so much fraud in our accounting and in our trading, and that wasn’t true. When you really peel back the onion and looked at the accounting that we used, and everybody always goes to mark-to-market accounting. That was approved by the SEC. That was not fraud. That was legal to use. Many companies still use that kind of accounting.
Traci Brown: Oh really?
Cindy Olson: Oh yea, especially if they’re trying to reflect their assets at a market value versus at a cost value. In the trading business, that documentary makes it sound like we were just gambling, right, and because I was in charge of the back office of Enron Capital and Trade, part of that was balancing the risks books every night. We made a lot of money in trading and we did it right and there was not fraud in the way we traded. However, okay, the other thing that I didn’t like about the documentary is there was never anything, if you really watch that documentary, there was anything positive about Enron.
Traci Brown: No, not a thing.
Cindy Olson: Not a thing. They don’t talk about how we were the most innovative for six years in a row, the first one to ever do that. The only other company that’s done it is Apple. There is something positive. The second is we did create a culture where everybody felt like they had a purpose every single day, and they came to work feeling like we were changing the world. We also had a culture where people could build and create and that’s why we were innovative because people felt like they could build and create. I really think that it misses the mark in that it doesn’t talk abut some of the good things that Enron was all about. I go back today, and I have connected with a lot of ex-Enron employees. I don’t know that I’ve found anyone that didn’t say, if I could go back and work for Enron, I’d do it in a heartbeat because I’ll never find another company where the culture was so exciting. You’ve got to kind of understand that we were creating this culture that was very innovated. People were free to innovate and do things. A great example of that is when we built the trading system. I think it was in 1998 or 1999, the traders and our CIO decided that it was crazy for them to be on the phone with the counterparty, listen the them, tell them what they wanted the trade to be, they entered the trade in our system, so we built the trading platform that was used by the whole industry which was everybody entered their own trade, so there weren’t traders talking on the phone with the counterparties. The counterparties entered their own trades. It was more open. It was more transparent at that point. Like I said, it became the trading platform for the industry in a lot of different commodities.
Traci Brown: I noticed that, and they did elude to that on the documentary that you really were at the forefront of what might even be considered things like eTrade now.
Cindy Olson: Yea. Exactly. Yes. Traci that is exactly it. That’s a great example. That was exactly what it was. But I’ve got to say that the documentary got right in spades the fact that we had become so successful that we were becoming arrogant. We became very arrogant. I believe that leads you down a path where you believe that no matter what, you can’t fail. I think that our innovation bled into areas that probably should not have been innovative, like accounting. I know Jeff Skilling used to say, we’re really loose because we want people to innovate, but we’re really tight when it comes to controls. But I do believe that we weren’t tight as he thought we were in terms of the controls that could have identified some of the issues. I would love to share with the audience a story – it’s not a story, it’s actually what happened. I’ve reconnected with Andy Fastow. Andy was our CFO. He told me a story that I think really shows how we had gotten were we got. Right. I think it’s going to be a lesson that your audience that takes out of this that’s going to make them step back and think, oh my gosh. Andy had been named the most innovative CIO by CIO magazine. He went into the boardroom in early 2001 with a schedule where he was going to show the board how much he’d accomplished with respect to our off balance sheet partnerships and what those off balance sheet partnerships had done to our credit rating. He had a schedule of all those off balance sheet partnerships and if we had not created those, and there were quite a few of them, and they were legal, by the way. Off balance sheet partnerships were legal, but when you take an aggregate number of off balance sheet partnerships and you see how much you’ve changed the balance sheet, that’s when it starts to become questionable. He’d taken into the board a spreadsheet that showed that if we had not created the off balance sheet partnerships, our credit would have been a B—instead of an AA credit rating.
Traci Brown: Wow.
Cindy Olson: When I speak now I tell that story and I ask the audience: So what would your board have said if you were the CFO and you showed them that you really had created a mechanism by which the credit rating was higher and your cost of money was lowery? It was valuable to the company to have that kind of credit rating. What would your board have said? In the case of Andy, the board said: Wow, that’s great, Andy. Keep it up.
Traci Brown: Oh.
Cindy Olson: Here’s the issue. It was legal. Everything that he showed them was legal, but when you really step back and look at it, was it ethical? I think that’s the thing that every single company needs to ask themselves because we were very clever, very innovative at figuring ways to do things that were legal, but really when you step back and looked it, it wasn’t ethical.
Traci Brown: That brings up a good point. Keep going and then I want to bring up something about that.
Cindy Olson: When we talk about fraud, and people always say to me, lots of fraud, when did you know you were going down the slippery slope? It’s interesting because to an executive committee member, they’ll say, we didn’t think we were creating fraud because everything we were doing was legal except Andy did steal money. He did manage the off balance sheet partnerships and pay himself money which he wasn’t supposed to do, so that was illegal. But all of the structures that we set up were legal, but then when you really look at it, they were clever instruments that helped us look different than we really were.
Traci Brown: On that legal versus ethical topic, what about some of these California power plant shutdowns and things like that?
Cindy Olson: I remember those. I remember those. Here’s the issue. Enron owned the market. We had a monopoly. We could manipulate the market and honestly in the documentary there is – I can’t remember it, it’s a California senator, someone and she’s going, they manipulated the market and they did and they did it and they did it, and we did do it, and we made lots of money doing it. Right. Now, was that illegal? No. It wasn’t illegal. Was it ethical? That wasn’t ethical.
Traci Brown: Right.
Cindy Olson: That’s why you’ve really got to put that ethical filter on things and not just . . . because so many companies go to the attorneys, and we did it too. When Ken lay got the . . . when Sharon Watkins came to me with their letter and talked about how all the stuff we were doing wasn’t really right, he had Vinson & Elkins and Arthur Anderson look at everything, and they came back and said it was all fine. From an accounting and a legal standpoint, it was fine, but when you really looked at what we did in the case of accounting, it wasn’t ethical.
Traci Brown: Were you so far in the middle of it that you couldn’t see that? Did it bug you or concern anybody at the time? What was the attitude?
Cindy Olson: The attitude really was, just like I said, you’ve got a board, a board that was well paid, and I think the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times said this about our board: We didn’t have a junior varsity board, we had a stellar board. And they were paid lots of money. If a board of a company is giving accolades to Andy for doing what we did with the off balance sheet partnerships and saying, we want more, how do you think we thought? We thought that we were doing the things that the company should be doing. Right.
Traci Brown: Right.
Cindy Olson: We were not, none of us, in fact, gosh I remember in late November, I was thinking to myself, there’s no way we’re going to file for bankruptcy. It was two weeks later that we did. I would guess that most executives are going to say that we didn’t really see any of this as illegal or fraudulent or any of that until we filed for bankruptcy, and even then, like I was talking to the Wall Street Journal reporter, John, in an email the other day, and he said, you know, one of the things you point out is that no one in the financial crisis was prosecuted, indicted, and it made Enron look like child’s play. Right. I said, the problem we had was we were early. If we had imploded, the implosion or bankruptcy was a liquidity issue, just like it was in the 2008 financial crisis when AIG and Goldman sold the credit default swaps that they couldn’t then pay out because they didn’t have the money to do it. We were in a liquidity crisis because many of our financial contracts were based on Enron’s stock price. As our stock price fell, the banks needed more collateral to be able to hold our notes. It became a liquidity crisis. I’ve shared with John a couple of the people that were actually at Enron for 10 years. It took 10 years to unravel the contracts, and they collected billions of dollars. We weren’t a real true bankruptcy because we had more assets than we had liabilities, but when we brought in the bankruptcy attorneys, they were making a million dollars a week.
Traci Brown: Yea. I heard that.
Cindy Olson: It was like, if we could . . . Ken Lay was my mentor. We had dinner right before he died out in Colorado, and one of the things that he told my husband and I is that he wished he’d never filed for bankruptcy because he thinks if he had just gone to the banks, JP Morgan Chase at the time was our big bank, and talked about how we could get out of that without filing for bankruptcy, he thinks that maybe we could have come out of it. A lot of people say that 9/11 happened in September of that year and the financial markets were froze, a lot of say that because of 9/11 that might not have happened. The problem I think we had is there was just all these things that happened and we were not, as in the financial crisis, we were not going to bring the whole economic structure down around the world. If you really talk to some of the people that were at the Fed during the 2008 and 2009 crisis, they’ll tell you that they had a lot of conversations about whether to go after executives in those firms or not, and they chose not to because they felt like they could take the whole financial market down.
Traci Brown: Oh yea. That’s the thing. Trust is huge in our . . . like we have to trust the banks or nothing works.
Cindy Olson: That’s right. That’s right.
Traci Brown: As soon as the bankers start going to jail, we have a big problem, like a bigger problem than we think we’d have if all of them go to jail.
Cindy Olson: Right. That’s right. It’s been interesting because I have continued to look at everything and evaluate and, of course, when you’ve got people like John Emshwiller coming in and saying, Cindy, can you help me find so and so? Here’s what I think, and I really want to do this podcast with the real story, right, it’s hard for me to let go. Then you look back and you go, 20 years has past. Right. I really think the big lesson out of Enron is this, and I would love to be able to build a culture and a company like we had before, but without the bad stuff, without the arrogance, without the . . . It was too much of . . . we felt like we could do anything, and nobody would stop us. Right. If I could, I would love to build a company where we really did create and innovate and everybody loved their job and came to work every day totally committed and engaged with their job and not have the bad stuff, but I just don’t know. I don’t know that it’ll ever happen because there are not a lot of companies out there where, when I describe Enron, for instance, working from home, Traci. It’s been interesting to listen to people talk about, oh my gosh, we can let our employees work from home. I’m thinking, yea, we gave everybody a computer at home in 1999, and 25,000 employees got a computer at home in 1999 so they could work from home because we figured out back then that people could be more productive if they had that infrastructure at home and if they couldn’t come into the office, which would save us money from an office space standpoint . . .
Traci Brown: Oh yea.
Cindy Olson: . . . and a utility standpoint. I’m looking at that and going, oh my gosh, you guys, we were doing that way back and I can’t believe that you think that all of a sudden this is something that is innovative.
Traci Brown: (Laughing). The cat’s out of the bag now.
Cindy Olson: Yes. I think, I don’t know, you’ve probably seen statistics, but I know I’ve seen some statistics that say that before this happened it was 9% that worked from home that could and now it will probably come back to about 30% that will work from home.
Traci Brown: I’m curious to see and I was just talking to my husband about it yesterday because he works in Louisville which is between Boulder and Denver. We’re in Boulder. The traffic to get to Boulder from Denver in the mornings is nasty. It is horrible. I’m surprised all those people don’t go postal.
Cindy Olson: I know.
Traci Brown: To do that every day. I was out yesterday or the day before, no traffic at all, and that’s because in Boulder it’s mostly white collar and you know what, I would be surprised if we see that return to anywhere close to the old levels because look, who’s here? Google. We have a big Google. These people can work from home. Even my husband, he’s like, I’m so much more productive at home and he’s so much less stressed too because there’s that factor. It is so profound, his lack of stress because he’s a rocket scientist, and he builds satellites and all sorts of things. He’s one of the reasons why we can watch little cat videos on Facebook. (Laughing).
Cindy Olson: (Laughing).
Traci Brown: I mean, among other things. He does some defense. But his stress level is so low, our relationship is so much better. It’s never been this good because he doesn’t come home stressed and looking for a fight or looking for an argument. But get this, he’s got his hearing back. He couldn’t hear.
Cindy Olson: Wow.
Traci Brown: He’s got his sense of smell and taste back and all his stress that he just carried around for so long, it was cutting off his senses. I didn’t know it. He didn’t know it. But now it’s back.
Cindy Olson: (Laughing).
Traci Brown: Now he’s walking through the house and he can hear me from the other room, which is amazing, and he’ll smell something in the house. He’s like, what is that? I’m like, babe, that’s dinner. (Laughing).
Cindy Olson: (Laughing).
Traci Brown: And he had no idea before. That part has been amazing for us, and I hope he doesn’t really have to go back to at least full time in the office.
Cindy Olson: Yea. I would agree with you. I hope companies are taking note because you don’t really have – I always used to call it face time – you don’t need face time if you can work from home, and then the other thing is a lot of companies I think are going to find that if they allow this, they’re going to find more women that stick around because even when they have children, if they’re allowed to be more flexible with flexible schedules and work from home, they’ll be able to keep those women. Right. I think there are a lot of value that surely these companies have seen. This might be a good thing for you to get some people on and talk about because it does give, there is so much flexibility, you can find talent anywhere. I think the only big issue, and which is kind of up your alley, is the fact that now that you’re working from home you’ve got to really make sure that you’ve got good cyber protection.
Traci Brown: Yep, and control.
Cindy Olson: Yea. There are those controls that need to be looked at. Then, of course, the culture. You’ve got to make sure that you’re keeping people engaged with each other, but with all the stuff that we’ve got, like teams, and Zoom and all that, there really are opportunities to do that.
Traci Brown: There is. Considering how, I mean, you have a lot to say about culture, what would have done differently back then? Would you have done anything differently, I mean, considering how everything turned out? What’s your biggest take home from this whole thing?
Cindy Olson: I think the biggest take home is stay grounded and humble. It’s interesting because Ken Lay was that. Jeff became the face of the company. I quickly have to say that we would not have been the most innovative company without Jeff Skilling. On the same token, he was one of the reasons why I think we all felt it was okay to be arrogant. I think a culture like we had can be good without the arrogance. The other thing too, I would, you know the rank and yank thing that you talked about, wow. At the time I thought it was a great way to really determine who was contributing to the company, but I think that it created a lot of animosity and tension because everybody was ranked and the supervisors had to fight for their people and where they ended up. There was a lot of just turmoil that was around that, and I think that there’s a better way to do that. Most companies now are not even rating people. Right. They’re going to feedback, but not really a ranking. I think there are definitely some things that, those are the two that come to mind that I would change. I wouldn’t change anything that really allowed us, not allowed, but really incentivized people to be innovative because I think that was the part that everybody loved. They loved to be able to create. They loved to be listened to. They loved to be able to be valued for what they contributed. Right.
Traci Brown: Now – oh, go ahead.
Cindy Olson: It’s a balancing act. How do you get that, and then on the other hand, not have the arrogance and the turmoil and the competition that was created with our performance management system?
Traci Brown: Right, right. How would you incentivize innovation these days?
Cindy Olson: Well, I still think that you’ve got to allow people to come up with ideas. Innovation is one of things. It’s the result of inspiration or it’s the result of desperation. Right. In this COVID world, there is a lot of innovation that’s taking place just out of desperation. But you’ve got to let people come up with ideas that are inspiring or that solve issues. I think that’s really important. It depends on the leadership. You’ve got to have leaders that encourage and don’t shut people down and say, oh, that’ll never work. You know, encourage them to go out and talk to other people in the company about your idea. How would you make that work? What would be the plan? Let them see if they can come up with some of that because I think that the innovation doesn’t happen at the very top of the organization. Innovation happens in the middle or at the bottom of the organization where everything is getting done. To have that innovative culture, I think you’ve almost got to have leaders that allow those ideas to bubble up. Then, not shut them down because so many times leaders will say, well, you know, that idea is not right, it’s not smart, or it’s stupid or whatever. You can’t do that. You’ve got to look at every single idea and say, great, well go take the lead on that and see if you can make it work.
Traci Brown: Now, would you go so far as to have a budget for, I don’t know, innovation failures or something along those lines? Because not everything is going to work.
Cindy Olson: I know. That’s very interesting. I’ve been asked that question before. Even boards of directors have said, how much innovation can we tolerate? They’re really asking how much failure can we tolerate?
Traci Brown: Yea, yea.
Cindy Olson: I don’t remember us ever talking about having any budget for failure. I mean, I think what our whole deal was, fail fast, and then figure out if it’s not going to work, it’s not going to work, then move on. It doesn’t have to be . . . we tried having this innovation center and we called it an accelerator and it was a formalized process. It doesn’t work. You know, I don’t believe in get people to think innovatively and have them come together to put the ideas on the board and figure out which one. I think the really innovative ideas are just born in the organization and then someone takes the initiative to figure out how it’s done and then it happens. How would I reward that? I’d reward the people that actually go make it happen, not the ideas, because everybody can have an idea, but people that figure out how to go make it happen, reward those people a lot. There’s a pool of money to reward those people, that you encourage them, encourage people to do that kind of thing, and I that’s where the dollars need to be, not in how much money can we afford to lose, but how much money do we give to people that really truly come up with an idea and operationalize it.
Traci Brown: Exactly. Ooh, I love that. I want to talk about what you’re doing now. You’re just such a wealth of knowledge here. Any last thoughts on Enron?
Cindy Olson: Yea. I think the thoughts that I want to just reinforce is this. I was almost embarrassed that I didn’t really think about the whole ethical versus legal because all of us kept saying, everything we’re doing is legal. We asked the SEC. We did this. We ran everything by Arthur Anderson. We ran everything by Vinson & Elkins. I think a lot of companies do that today. They say, okay, it’s been blessed by our accountants or our outside legal counsel, whatever, but I think you’ve got to have this moral compass that basically says, is it really truly ethical? That’s hard to have because if you’re a public company, you’re so driven by the earnings. But I think that is where the rubber meets the road, that you have to have that additional, it’s a layer of gut check that says, yea, this might be legal, but in the aggregate, do we really want to have 15 or 20 off balance sheet partnerships? I mean, you’ve got to have someone that’s there asking the questions, and it’s got to be the leader. I think that’s the biggest, biggest learning that I would say that I’ve had. Believe me, I have looked at this. I have got a white paper. I don’t if I ever sent you the white paper.
Traci Brown: No.
Cindy Olson: I sent it to a guy. He reached out to me from Florida. He buys companies. He says, I want to do it right. Can you help me? I said, let me send you my white paper. I would be more than happy to send my white paper to you, and you could distribute it.
Traci Brown: Oh, I’d love to.
Cindy Olson: It’s really looking at everything that we did and the issues that we had in what I would call the drivers of culture and it’s kind of a roadmap on how to create an innovative culture and what are the things that Enron did right and what are the things that Enron did wrong. I’d be more than happy to share that with your audience.
Traci Brown: Oh, yea, yea. For sure. Let’s do that. We’ll put the link in the show notes so anybody looking for that can have easy access. Let’s talk about what are you doing now? I’m so curious.
Cindy Olson: I think it’s really been driven by my passion to make sure that other companies don’t go down the same path that we did and really identifying the HR and IT right now today, your HR and IT departments, number one, they have to collaborate because the employee experience that you have to have when you’re working from home or anywhere, right, is dependent upon the humanity and then the technology, right, coming together. What I’ve done is in partnership with ADP and everybody kind of goes, ADP? But they are the most innovative company out there as far as an HCM right now.
Traci Brown: Define HCM, just in case.
Cindy Olson: Okay. A human capital management system. Everybody’s got an Oracle PeopleSoft system that does their payroll and talent management and all that. An HCM is a bundle of integrated HR processes, right. You’ve either got an SAP in Oracle or Workday and now ADP has got the next gen HCM. In concert with them, because they’ve helped me build this, we’ve built a network in 11 cities of thought leadership groups that come together quarterly. We’ve got about 750 CHROs and CIOs in 11 cities that come together quarterly and get really good thought leadership. What I’m doing is trying to create leaders that know things that are out there in the future using my innovation from Enron and then also understanding that the employee experience has to be driven by the collaboration between HR and IT. I’m bringing these groups together and then what we’re doing is we’re also allowing them to get leadership training. I’m working with Deloitte on how to help those two functions and those two executives become board members. They all want to be on a paid board. Deloitte is helping me with board readiness.
Traci Brown: Oh, cool.
Cindy Olson: I’m working with a cybersecurity expert on how to really help companies understand what things have to be in place and culture is a big part of cybersecurity.
Traci Brown: Oh yea.
Cindy Olson: I’m using my Enron experience from an innovation standpoint and from an HR standpoint and trying to help C-suite leaders be better and drive better organizations.
Traci Brown: Ooh, I love that. How can people get in touch with you and find out maybe how to join or how to get a chapter in their city?
Cindy Olson: We’re just in the process of getting our website up. It’s going to be ExecutiveStrategicAlliance.com. That should be up in about a month. If they want to email me personally, they can send me an email at Cindy@ExecutiveStrategicAlliance.com. I’ll be more than happy to help. Like the guy that contacted me, he found me through LinkedIn, and I’m going to help him with some of his private equity acquisitions and see if I can help him with culture. I’m more than happy to help anybody that needs it and then if you want to get involved in the Executive Strategic Alliance, just let me know.
Traci Brown: Oh, I love that. Thank you so much for coming on Fraud Busting today. You’re just a gem.