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The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
by Peter Elkind
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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £4.34
Your Save: £ 0.00 ( % )
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Penguin
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 333
EAN: 9780141011455
ISBN: 0141011459
Label: Penguin
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 2004-09-30
Publisher: Penguin
Studio: Penguin
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Simply Brilliant - a must read if the collapse of Enron interests you
Comment: As someone from the media industry, when the Enron scandal was among us, I noted with unhinged irony how books, literature and exposés on the failed giant were simply mushrooming as the subject itself was in ruins. I wondered if there would ever be a book we could describe as the complete package. I am positively delighted to observe that this book is it.
The authors Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind read between the lines, probed and told the story with the sort of brevity and authoritative panache that few Enron insiders have managed, let alone mainstream observers. It would be prudent to remember that McLean, as a reporter, first asked the question about what makes Enron tick; something which had been troubling analysts in certain quarters for a while back in 2001.
Her probing mind and objective treatment of the subject is well reflected in this exceptional account following Enron's collapse. The authors promised to chart the "amazing rise and scandalous fall or Enron", and I feel that they have delivered.
This book is not one-dimensional, it is multi-layered. Whistle-blowing, leaked emails, hidden trading fiascos, evoking of the Fifth Amendment by Enron executives, overseas misadventures, deception, a culture of greed and human tragedy have all been treated at length. Fragile egos of its executives, traders' cockiness and even idiosyncrasies of the egregious Jeff Skilling (CEO of Enron) have been described in considerable detail. The brilliance of this work is that authors' insight into the minds of the Enron executives against a backdrop of the company's wider culture helps the reader understand what ultimately triggered its downfall.
I am inclined to think that Smartest Guys in the Room, is the best and the most definitive book on the Enron fiasco till date and it would take some Herculean effort to better it. It's a must read if the Enron scandal interests you, hit you or intrigues you. If you wish to know about the episode for the very first time, look no further than this riveting account.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly engaging
Comment: I found this book to be extremely engaging. I knew nothing in advance of the details of the downfall of Enron but found the balance between the technical aspects and the personalities involved easy to follow and extremely interesting. A great read and a good warning of egos riding roughshod over reality.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Barbarians in the Accounting Department
Comment: This is a great book about a truly remarkable part of our economic history. I have a minor physical complaint I might as well get off my chest: In their desire to make sure readers get bang for buck (fear not: you do), the publishers have elected to set this book in miniscule type, meaning firstly that you may need reading glasses if not before then after reading it, and secondly that while this looks like a 400 page book, if it were ordinarily typeset it would have the heft of an MM Kaye novel.
On the other hand, if over-length in a business book is the sort of thing that dissuades you, don't let it: this is one of the most riveting books on the history of finance you'll read, and it gets more and more addictive the further you go on.
As a number of reviewers have noted, it is simply staggering that Enron can have ever got where it got to at all, let alone stayed there for the best part of a decade, with all the ostenisble checks and balances that sophisticated capital markets provide. Staggering. In checks and balances I don't mean regulators, who will always be the last ones to find out where market-based moral turpitude is concerned, but investors, stock analysts, brokers, lenders, rating agencies and fund managers: people who don't just earn huge remuneration, but stake their reputations on being sceptical in the face of unconvincing bluster.
But as McLean and Elkind make clear in chapter after chapter, barely disguised and unconvinving bluster was, in large part, all Enron was. For all the "black box" accounting, it is simply inconceivable that Enron's true internal wiring could be kept anything like properly secret, since far too many people had to know about it. Internal and external to Enron there must have been junior lawyers, accountants, auditors, traders and marketers who all had to know what was going on, and people *do* talk: they gossip, they change jobs, they make inappropriate remarks. What's more, the existence (if not the detail) of many of the more toxic situations - the LJM Partnerships, the prepay contracts - were on the public record, so the burning question to my mind, which McLean and Elkind do not address, isn't so much how people could have been so greedy and deceitful (that's not hard to understand at all), but what sociological and psychological factors caused everyone else, collectively, to entirely suspend the critical faculties which they used to evaluate risks in the market. This is no idle query: accurately calibrating and understanding risk is the very key to making money on Wall Street: it's hardly an incidental oversight.
Making a pejorative moral assessment of the acts of the Skillings and Lays with the benefit of hindsight is futile, self-serving, and actually unjust: our moral view of corporate behaviour *today* is conditioned and informed by the example of Enron; before Enron, our moral view was ipso facto different - if it hadn't been, Enron couldn't have happened.
If we assume that, in the context of the markets, "moral consensus" is aimed at making sure people don't needlessly mislead, deceive or unfairly disadvantage each other, the far more interesting question is *how could the prevailing moral framework have failed so badly*? Why was it so inadequate at dealing with outcomes of actions we can now see (with the benefit of hindsight and our newly adjusted moral binoculars) are transparently odious?
And that prompts a deeper question yet: what could it be about *our* prevailing economic mores which could allow a disaster on a similar scale to happen again?
Had Elkind and MacLean ventured into that territory this would have been an outstanding book (it is still worth 5 stars in my view): as it was - and with an admirable absence of judgmental prurience - the writers stick to pure reportage, to the point where the epilogue ends rather abruptly without so much as a conclusion.
But that's small beer: this is a fascinating, rewarding read.
Olly Buxton
Customer Rating:
Summary: You must read this astounding book
Comment: I knew a little of the Enron story but the hard facts are absolutely astonishing. The book shines a very harsh light on the world of high finance and exposes the shenanigans. This is a story of venal greed and corruption on an almost Biblical scale. Any confidence one might have in the investment industry is just swept away by this book.
It reads like a thriller and is a real 'page turner' although sometimes it takes a couple of reads before I vaguely understand some of the financial scams (maybe it's just me). I would recommend this book whole heartedly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you have a pension, be afraid, be very afraid
Comment: This book does exactly what it says on the cover - it charts the amazing rise and scandalous fall of Enron. It is well written, lucid, and chronicles the trail of havoc and destruction left by a gang of greedy and corrupt men. From the outset the company recruited as its executives only people of above average intellegence, and virtually to a man they used that intellegence to lie, cheat, and steal. Cynically, it was the very regulations put in place to prevent fraud that Enron and its collaborators used as inspiration to cheat their shareholders and employees. Their accomplices, the accounting firms, law firms, and investment banks, were all complicit. As long as the fees kept rolling in, everything was just fine.
But ironically, as zealous prophets of a free market, it was the free market that eventually brought Enron down. It wasn't the regulators, or conscience-stricken advisors, that sounded the company's death-knell - it was short sellers.
The frightening thing is that even after a few exemplary jail terms and fines, they are all still out there - managing your money. You would get a better, more honest, more open, bargain from a drug dealer than you would from the investment community. Be afraid, be very afraid - and if you are not, buy the book, because you will be after you've read it.
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