The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron

by Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind, Joe Nocera (Foreword by)

Overview

In this tenth-anniversary edition, acclaimed investigative journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind deliver the definitive account of the fall of Enron, one of the biggest scandals in corporate America history.
 
Meticulously researched and character driven, The Smartest Guys in the Room takes the reader deep into Enron's past—and behind the closed doors of private meetings. Drawing on a wide range of unique sources, the book follows Enron's rise from obscurity to the top of the business world to its disastrous demise. It reveals as never before major characters such as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow, as well as lesser-known players like Cliff Baxter and Rebecca Mark. 
 
It is a story of greed, arrogance, and deceit—a microcosm of all that can go wrong with American business. Above all, it's a fascinating human drama that has proven to be the authoritative account of the Enron scandal. In this tenth anniversary edition, McLean and Elkind revisit the fall of Enron and its aftermath in a new chapter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591846604
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/26/2013
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	97,954
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind collaborated on this book when they both were Fortune senior writers. McLean, a former investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs, is now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and lives in Chicago. Elkind, an award-winning investigative reporter, is now an editor-at-large for Fortune and lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

On a cool Texas night in late January, Cliff Baxter slipped out of bed. He stuffed pillows under the covers so his sleeping wife wouldn’t notice he was gone. Then he stepped quietly through his large suburban Houston home, taking care not to awaken his two children. The door alarm didn’t make a sound as he entered the garage; he’d disabled the security system before turning in. Then, dressed in blue jogging slacks, a blue T-shirt, and moccasin slippers, he climbed into his new black Mercedes-Benz S500 and drove out into the night.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Smartest Guys in the Room"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Bethany McLean.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Authors' Notes and Acknowledgments	vii
	Cast of Characters	xiii
	Our Values	xix
	Introduction	xxi
1.	Lunch on a Silver Platter	1
2.	"Please Keep Making Us Millions"	15
3.	"We Were the Apostles"	27
4.	The First Prima Donna	44
5.	Guys with Spikes	55
6.	The Empress of Energy	70
7.	The 15 Percent Solution	85
8.	A Recipe for Disaster	100
9.	The Klieg-Light Syndrome	114
10.	The Hotel Kenneth-Lay-a	132
11.	Andy Fastow's Secrets	150
12.	The Big Enchilada	171
13.	"An Unnatural Act"	189
14.	The Beating Heart of Enron	212
15.	Everybody Loves Enron	229
16.	When Pigs Could Fly	246
17.	Gaming California	264
18.	Bandwidth Hog	284
19.	"Ask Why, Asshole"	313
20.	"I Want to Resign"	337
21.	The $45 Million Question	352
22.	"We Have No Cash!"	378
	Epilogue: Isn't Anybody Sorry?	406
	Index	415

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The best book about the Enron debacle to date.”
—BusinessWeek
 
“The authors write with power and finesse. Their prose is effortless, like a sprinter floating down the track.”
—USA Today
 
“Well-reported and well-written.”
—Warren Buffett

Editorial Reviews

The best book about the Enron debacle to date.”
—BusinessWeek
 
“The authors write with power and finesse. Their prose is effortless, like a sprinter floating down the track.”
—USA Today
 
“Well-reported and well-written.”
—Warren Buffett

From the Publisher

Enron, that microcosm of American corporate misdeeds, continues to captivate us. Not since Watergate has a scandal reverberated through so many books. In The Smartest Guys in the Room, Bethany McLean, the first journalist to "out" the story in a major national publication, and eagle-eyed investigative reporter Peter Elkind endow the unfolding story with the gathering tension of a well-turned novel. Their rendering of boardroom feuds and bookkeeping trickery casts vivid light on the strong personalities involved.

The portrait of the narcissistic culture fostered by Enron's president, Kenneth Lay, since the mid-1980's is so vivid that the reader is amazed but not really shocked when the boom of the late 90's provides the spark that ultimately engulfs the entire enterprise in flames. — Jonathan A. Knee

The New York Times

Fortune reporter McLean's article in early 2001 questioning Enron's high valuation was cited by many as an early harbinger of the company's downfall, but she refrains from tooting her own horn, admitting that the article "barely scratched the surface" of what was wrong at America's seventh-largest corporation. The story of its plunge into bankruptcy (co-written with magazine colleague Elkind) barely touches upon the personal flamboyances highlighted in earlier Enron books, focusing instead on the shady finances and the corporate culture that made them possible. Former CEO Jeff Skilling gets much of the blame for hiring people who constantly played by their own rules, creating a "deeply dysfunctional workplace" where "financial deception became almost inevitable," but specific accountability for the underhanded transactions is passed on to others, primarily chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, whose financial conflicts of interest are recounted in exacting detail. (Skilling seems to have cooperated extensively with the authors, though clearly not to universal advantage.) A companywide sense of entitlement, particularly at the top executive levels, comes under close scrutiny, although the extravagant habits of those like Ken Lay, while blatant, are presented without fanfare. The real detail is saved for transactions like the deals that led to the California energy crisis and a 1986 scandal, mirroring the problems faced a decade later, that left the company "less than worthless" until a last-minute rescue. The book's sober financial analysis supplements that of Mimi Swartz's Power Failure, while offering additional perspectives that flesh out the details of the Enron story. (Oct. 13) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Take your chances: this study is embargoed. Fortune writer McLean's "Is Enron Overpriced?" shows she had doubts about Enron way back in March 2001. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The biggest and most shocking business story of our time is the Enron debacle, and Fortune's senior writers Bethany Mclean and Peter Elkind have dug up the full story of the players and the plays that created the scandal of the century. The Smartest Guys in the Room details the rise and fall of the Enron empire as well as its cast of intriguing characters in a gripping narrative that is based on a wide range of private documents and exclusive sources. Copyright © 2003 Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

The story of Enron’s rise and fall is one of innovation betrayed by arrogance and intelligence subverted by greed. Dennis Boutsikaris narrates as if he’d been there. His voice is pleasant, and he mostly keeps a good pace though that makes some complicated business and financial matters go by rather quickly. He ably uses patterns of inflection and intonation, especially a certain dryness and wryness, to express the disbelief, disapprobation, bemusement, and occasional schadenfreude the events merit. Those patterns are sometimes repetitious, but so are the patterns of human and corporate wrongdoing that fill this book. Boutsikaris makes the tawdry, sometimes-complex story easy to listen to. W.M. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2011 - AudioFile

The story of Enron’s rise and fall is one of innovation betrayed by arrogance and intelligence subverted by greed. Dennis Boutsikaris narrates as if he’d been there. His voice is pleasant, and he mostly keeps a good pace though that makes some complicated business and financial matters go by rather quickly. He ably uses patterns of inflection and intonation, especially a certain dryness and wryness, to express the disbelief, disapprobation, bemusement, and occasional schadenfreude the events merit. Those patterns are sometimes repetitious, but so are the patterns of human and corporate wrongdoing that fill this book. Boutsikaris makes the tawdry, sometimes-complex story easy to listen to. W.M. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2011 - AudioFile