But executives like Fastow, in finance, were never going to make that kind of money. And that’s because the finance department, important though it was to ECT’s success, wasn’t a profit center in its own right. It didn’t contribute directly to Enron’s earnings; as they say in business, it didn’t have its own P&L. (The letters P&L stand for profit and loss. The phrase means that a division isn’t just a cost center; it makes money for the company.) “The whole story about Andy is that if you didn’t have a P&L at Enron and you didn’t add a lot of money to the P&L, you weren’t a man,” says a former
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