Buy new:
$46.00$46.00
Ships from: 醍狭曝 Sold by: NEXUSCA
Save with Used - Very Good
$24.99$24.99
Ships from: ThriftBooks-Dallas US Sold by: ThriftBooks-Dallas US

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer C no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Image Unavailable
Colour:
-
-
-
- To view this video, download
Follow the authors
OK
Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron Hardcover C Jan. 1 2003
醍狭曝
Purchase options and add-ons
Then a young Fortune writer named Bethany McLean wrote an article posing a simple question - How, exactly, does Enron make its money? - and the company's house of cards began to collapse. Though other business scandals would follow, none has had the shattering effect of Enron's bankruptcy, which caused Americans to lose faith in a system that rewarded top insiders with millions of dollars while small investors, including many Enron employees, lost everything.
Despite enormous media coverage of Enron, the definitive story of its astonishing rise and fall comes alive for the first time in this gripping narrative, by McLean and her Fortune colleague Peter Elkind. Drawing on a wide range of private documents and well-placed sources, many of them exclusive, McLean and Elkind lead you behind closed doors and deep into Enron's past, to pierce the veil of secrecy that has surrounded the company's inner workings and corrupt culture.
The Smartest Guys in the Room is fundamentally a human drama -- of people drunk on their own success, people so ambitious, so certain of their own brilliance, so fueled by greed and hubris that they believed they could fool the world. The book explores the motives, thoughts, and secret fears of a fascinating array of characters, including:
* Ken Lay, the genial but clueless CEO who reveled in the trappings of his office but ducked the responsibilities. From the earliest days of Enron, his weakness allowed greedy lieutenants to run amok.
* Jeff Skilling, the brooding, mercurial genius who was the architect of Enron's greatest triumphs-and its ultimate disgrace. "I am Enron," he once boasted. As the company unraveled, so did Skilling.
* Rebecca Mark, the glamorous "It" girl of Enron International who raced around the globe in high style and battled Skilling for control of the company.
* Andy Fastow, the brutally ambitious, deeply insecure whiz kid. Inside Enron his colleagues marveled at how his complex schemes allowed the company to scam Wall Street-not realizing that he was secretly scamming Enron.
* Ken Rice, the Midwestern farm boy who was seduced by Enron's fast-money culture and who cashed in while hyping a high-tech business that didn't exist.
* Cliff Baxter, the manic deal maker and Skilling confidant who resented Fastow's murky self-dealing. "He's a goddamn master criminal," Baxter would rail.
Just as Watergate was the defining political story of our time, so Enron is the biggest business story of our time. And just as All the President's Men was the one Watergate book that gave readers the full story, with all the drama and nuance, The Smartest Guys in the Room is the one book you have to read to understand this amazing business saga.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPortfolio Hardcover
- Publication dateJan. 1 2003
- Dimensions16.51 x 3.68 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-101591840082
- ISBN-13978-1591840084

Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital C start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed
- The Enron scandal grew out of a steady accumulation of habits and values and actions that began years before and finally spiraled out of control.Highlighted by 782 Kindle readers
- ^Always make it about the other guy, never about yourself, ̄ Wing liked to say. By that he meant that a good negotiator needs to create a set of possible outcomes that allow him to win no matter what the other side does.Highlighted by 763 Kindle readers
- There are two other potential problems with mark-to-market accounting. The first is the mismatch between profits and cash.Highlighted by 690 Kindle readers
Product description
From 醍狭曝
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product details
- Publisher : Portfolio Hardcover
- Publication date : Jan. 1 2003
- Edition : First Edition
- Language : English
- Print length : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1591840082
- ISBN-13 : 978-1591840084
- Item weight : 816 g
- Dimensions : 16.51 x 3.68 x 24.13 cm
- 醍狭曝 Rank: #52,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #237 in Popular Economics (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Peter Elkind, an award-winning investigative reporter, is the co-author of the national bestseller, The Smartest Guys in the Room, about the collapse of Enron. He has also written Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and recently re-published his first book, The Death Shift, the true-crime story of nurse Genene Jones and the Texas baby murders. In an extraordinary effort to keep her behind bars for the rest of her life--she was scheduled for mandatory release in March 2018--a San Antonio grand jury recently brought four new murder indictments against Jones, charging her in the deaths of children under her care more than three decades ago.
During twenty years on staff at Fortune magazine, Elkind wrote detailed accounts of the devastating cyberattack that struck Sony Pictures; the BP oil spill; America's controversial visa-for-sale program; big business' involvement in the battle over the Common Core education standards; Steve Jobs' deceptions about his health crisis; the bidding war among states for Elon Musk's billion-dollar Tesla Motors gigafactory; and 醍狭曝.com's (not so secret) war on taxes. Elkind has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and Texas Monthly, and is a former editor of the Dallas Observer. He lives in Texas and now works as a senior reporter at ProPublica, the investigative reporting non-profit.
Bethany McLean is a well-known journalist. Her March 2001 article in Fortune, "Is Enron Overpriced?," was the first in a national publication to openly question the company¨s dealings.
Customer reviews
Top reviews from Canada
There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.
- Reviewed in Canada on March 20, 2024Verified PurchaseAWESOME
- Reviewed in Canada on July 30, 2017Verified PurchaseLittle writing and high light but except that good condition
- Reviewed in Canada on March 7, 2022Verified PurchaseBook is fascinating, narrator was great - overall a terrific listen
- Reviewed in Canada on June 23, 2017Verified PurchaseExtremely well written and researched.
A fascinating read
- Reviewed in Canada on November 3, 2003This book will be especially valuable to those who have a keen interest in "the amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron." I also commend to their attention Smith and Emshwiller's 24 Hours: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America. The "smartest guys in the room" included Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Rebecca Mark, Andrew Fastow, Kenneth Rice, and Clifford Baxter. Whereas Smith and Emshwiller explored the same company as investigative reporters, McLean and Elkind seem (to me) to have approached their subject as corporate anthropologists. Both books reach many of the same conclusions as to what happened...and why.
Two significant differences are that Smith and Emshwiller limit their attention primarily to a period in 2002 extending from October 16th (when Enron announced huge losses caused by two partnerships) to December 3rd (when Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy); McLean and Elkind cover a two-year period of the company's "amazing rise and scandalous fall." Also, McLean and Elkind devote far more attention to each of the "smartest guys"; Smith and Emshwiller seem far less interested in them, except in terms of the impact of their mismanagement and corruption. Let's say there are two books about the collapse of the twin towers at the World Trade Center; one focuses on the human tragedies associated with it whereas a second book addresses design, construction, and structural issues. Obviously, both approaches are valid.
McLean and Elkind suggest that the eventual collapse of Enron was caused less by the greed of senior-level Enron executives than it was by their arrogance and incompetence. Their lack of basic business acumen is astonishing as is their defiance of regulatory agencies and contempt for customers. None of them seems to have had a moral "compass." They exemplified, indeed nourished a culture of brutal competition between and among their subordinates. Each used Enron as a personal ATM as well as a means by which to structure all manner of corporate partnerships and high risk/high yield investments without fear of any personal liability. If one prospered, so did they. If it failed, the loss was Enron's. On to another.
Primary blame for all this must be shared by Lay, Skilling, and Fastow. McLean and Elkind rigorously examine the inadequacies of each, suggesting that if only one of the three had not been involved, it is probable that Enron would not have had the problems it did. Attorneys, accountants, brokers (notably Merrill Lynch) and bankers (especially Citibank and JP Morgan Chase) apparently were aware of Enron's bending and then breaking of various laws but were earning so much in fees that they chose to remain at the Enron "trough" side-by-side with Lay, Skilling, Fastow, and other Enron executives.
Consider this brief excerpt from Chapter 10 (page 149):
Here's how another former employee explains the process: "Say you have a dog, but you need to create a duck on the financial statements. Fortunately there are specific accounting rules for what constitutes a duck: yellow feet, white covering, orange beak. So you take the dog and paint its feet yellow and its fur white and you paste an orange plastic beak on its nose, and then you say to your accountants, 'This is a duck! Don't you agree that it's a duck?' And the accountants say, 'Yes, according to the rules, this is a duck.' Everybody knows that it's a dog, not a duck, but that doesn't matter, because you've met the rules for calling it a duck."
There are so many other brief, equally revealing excerpts which I am tempted to include but won't. Earlier, I suggested that McLean and Elkind display in this volume many of the skills of a corporate anthropologist. I also commend them on their skills as storytellers. Of course, it helps to have many colorful characters and such an interesting narrative. Among business books, this is one of the rare "page turners." If Enron remains a classic example of organizational dysfunction, my guess is that this book will remain the definitive analysis of the causes and effects of that dysfunction.
- Reviewed in Canada on May 3, 2004Enron was the largest corporate bankruptcy to date. Just a year earlier it was a 70-billion dollar company and the most respected company in the energy field. By the end of 2001 Chuck Watson of Dynegy said he wouldn't take it if it were free. What happened? How could such a large and powerful conglomerate, in which analysts hyped right to the bitter end, fall so fast. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind take the reader from the beginning of Enron's rise to the colossal fall.
From the beginning Enron was determined to rewrite the "rules" of how the business of energy was done around the world. Ken Lay, the founder of Enron, learned the natural gas business from his early days at Florida Gas and then Transco Energy. In the early 1980's gas prices were largely regulated by the federal government. This led to gas shortages when prices were too low and oversupply when the government hiked prices. Distributors would try to lock into long-term contracts called "take or pay" to protect themselves from future shortages. These contracts were bad from the pipeline owner's point of view because they had to pay the higher rates even if lower rates were available. Lay saw a way out of this dilemma, however. He set up a fledgling spot market for natural gas. The producers who let Transco out of these long-term contracts could sell directly to their customers, paying Transco to move the gas. Lay was a hero and it would propel him toward his vision of a deregulated gas world in which customers would always have the gas they need at the best price.
When Ken Lay created Enron he had a different view of energy than anyone else in the business. When energy was deregulated in the late 19080's prices plunged. Money wasn't being made in oil; it was being made in trading oil. This was Lay's grand vision. In the words of the authors:"Oil trading was about trading, not about oil." The senior executives didn't know much about trading but as long as it made money no one cared. Oil trading was a way of promising to deliver oil in the future while locking in the price today.
From its earliest days Enron struggled to survive. Lay had a vision of the future but he needed someone to show him the way. Enter Jeff Skilling. To Skilling natural gas wasn't about energy; it was about supply and demand. Whenever there was too much supply or too much demand there was money to be made. Instead of long-term contracts between suppliers and customers Skilling envisioned Enron acting as an energy bank. They would purchase gas from producers at one price and sell it to customers at a higher price. Enron would profit from the exchange and the customer would always be able to get gas. All Enron needed to do was to have matching customers for every contract to buy natural gas. He would revolutionize the oil industry. He never cared for the old oil executives; he wanted smart Harvard graduates under him. It didn't matter to Skilling if they never worked in the industry before; they would figure it out.
The problems with Enron can be traced back to these early days. The people involved had great ideas but were poor in their ability to manage and carry them out. Those that could were treated as second class citizens by Enron management. They rewarded the people with the best ideas. It didn't matter if their grandiose plans never made any money. It would become the culture at Enron-a corporation built on vision but near-sighted on detail.
The book is a long and difficult 414 pages. The deals and machinations of Enron's senior management are difficult and complex. The Smartest Guys in the Room is about these deals and not about the people. We know very little about how people truly felt about Enron through its rise and fall but we know a great deal about the gory details. For those with some accounting background it is a fascinating story. For the general reader it probably will be a bit bewildering
Top reviews from other countries
- SimonReviewed in the United States on June 4, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars 'Let's sell it--and we'll figure out everything else later."
Verified PurchaseThe Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind digs into one of the most infamous and largest corporate business scandals in America¨s history. This was such a wild ride. Everything from corporate greed, mismanagement, cowardice, rivalry, a toxic work culture, and a need to constantly prove profitability to the public led to one fraud after another until Enron was literally built on a house of cards, or, to be more exact, on a house, nay, a mountain of debt. All this was hidden from the public investors they were supposed to protect, while executives were profiting from the soaring stock price.
^So you take the dog and paint its feet yellow and its fur white and you paste an orange plastic beak on its nose, and then you say to your accountants, `This is a duck! Don¨t you agree that it¨s a duck?¨ And the accountant say, `Yes, according to the rules, this is a duck.¨ Everybody knows that it¨s a dog, not a duck, but that doesn¨t matter, because you¨ve met the rules for calling it a duck. ̄ - Former Enron employee
Back in the early 2000s, when it all came crashing down, I remember only a few bits and pieces here and there. Mainly, I saw on television old white guys in the headlines dominating news channels regarding a business scandal and fraud. I failed to realize or feel the impact. Decades later, with more financial knowledge and investments made in the stock market, I wanted to finally revisit this saga and learn just how it all went down. It definitely blew my mind.
^I¨ve thought about this a lot, and all that matters is money. You buy loyalty with money. This touchy-feely stuff isn¨t as important as cash. That¨s what drives performance. ̄ - Jefferey Skilling¨s conversation with Terry Thorn
A tremendous effort has obviously been made by the authors to untangle the Enron mess after they imploded to give us the inside scoop on how this scandal went down. Although it is a fairly big book, it clearly deserves every page, in my opinion, as it slowly and methodically laid out from the very start of Enron to its ultimate demise. There are a lot of players and actions involved. Although no CPA myself, I was shocked to at least have understood the mark-to-market strategy of reporting year-end earnings, especially how it was used to game the system. Although there were many other accounting tricks used to commit fraud, it basically came down to hiding losses on their balance sheet and presenting itself every quarter to investors, analysts, and Wall Street as the coolest company ever in hopes of raising its stock price.
In fact, it was anything but effortless; there was nothing at Enron that required more effort, more cleverness, more deceit-more everything-than hitting its quarterly earnings targets. - Book authors
The last few chapters of the book were particularly exciting and kept me reading all night. The inevitable crash was coming. You knew in hindsight, so you just kept waiting for it until it finally started to unravel, and it was like watching a car crash in slow motion, but only because we now know the full story and extent of the problem and how Enron got there. I can¨t help but wonder how things would have turned out if Enron weren¨t as crazed about boasting their stock price and actually reporting true earnings as well as executing on their actual ideas. Would they have been in the coveted top 10 position in the S&P500 index today? They genuinely had some good ideas and were truly ahead of their time, but they didn¨t have the patience to see things through, not to mention a host of other issues as well.
-
JoseReviewed in Spain on October 5, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars No todo vale para ganar
Verified PurchaseMuy interesante libro que refleja la ca┴da de un imperio energ└tico (y financiero) as┴ como el final de una era. Si no fuera porque los protagonistas vulneraron sistem│ticamente la ley con muchas de sus decisiones (y su desmedida ambici┏n), casi se podr┴a sentir admiraci┏n por ellos. No todo vale en esta vida para ganar y este libro sirve un ejemplo paradigm│tico.
- JamesReviewed in Australia on December 25, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, detailed account of the Enron scandal
Verified PurchaseThis outstanding, detailed and methodically researched book gives a blow by blow account of Enron in its glory days and Its eventual downfall. Highly recommend.
-
KiroReviewed in Japan on May 22, 2008
5.0 out of 5 stars J-SOX 云よりずっと叨に羨つ
Verified PurchaseSOX 隈が恬られる圷となったエンロン並周のドキュメンタリ`。
干-皆或掛隈は、さまざまな坪何由崙のプロセスをg廾することを勣箔するが、云慕をiむとgはエンロンはその謹くのプロセスをgは隔っていたことがわかる。ただ、プロセスは、このような並周を軟こすことを契げるわけではなかった。
J-SOX 隈の貨がおわったら、肝に採を佩うべきか。いろいろなヒントがまっていると房う。
g佞淋はここまでとしても、gに繁gvSのドキュメントとしても、匯瞳である。啌鮫は晩云Z忖鳥つきで DVD になっているものの、云の鍬Uはまだのようだ。匯震も壼く鍬Uが竃てほしいと房う。
- PrameetReviewed in India on April 10, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars extremely well researched
Verified PurchaseBrilliant book, dives into exhaustive detail. Sketches out the characters complexity really well. Worth a read to understand some of the behaviour flaws that ruin a giant corporation.