Imagine a company where profits took second place to values, where workers could decide whether to be paid by the hour or get a salary, where there was no HR or PR or strategic planning department, where executives were trusted to make deals without approval from headquarters and where people were encouraged to have fun. That was the old AES—a radically decentralized and entrepreneurial power generation company where revenues grew to $7.5 billion and the headcount grew to more than 50,000 people—until it all nearly came crashing down, post-Enron.
Since then, AES has since recovered. My story about the Arlington, Va.-based company, called A Powerful Comeback, appears in the October 26 issue of FORTUNE. It was a fun story to report–AES is easily one of the most unusual companies I’ve run across, and the people who work there, who haven’t been written about much lately, were uniformly thoughtful, interesting and cooperative. Unfortunately, space is tight these days in the magazine biz so FORTUNE was only able to publish a fraction of what I wrote. Because there’s lots to say about this pioneering firm, whose goal is to bring clean, reliable and safe electric power to billions of people around the world, I’ll add a few thoughts here.
AES was started by two men who, by all accounts, were brilliant thinkers: Dennis Bakke and Roger Sant. Both were evangelists, in a way—Bakke was a deeply religious man who [click to continue…]
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