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

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

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04 · rating details · 3,553 ratings · 200 reviews

There were dozens of books about Watergate, but only All the President's Men gave readers the full story, with all the drama and nuance and exclusive reporting. And thirty years later, if you're going to read only one book on Watergate, that's still the one. Today, Enron is the biggest business story of our time, and Fortune senior writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind a...more

Paperback, 480 pages

Published September 28th 2004 by Portfolio Trade (first published 2003)

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Jan 05, 2009 George rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is a must for just about everyone. It reads like a novel, but unfortunately its all non- fiction. This book proves that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
For anyone who has an interest in protecting your wealth and hard earned money, this is a must reead. I learned how important it is how your personal actions and behaviours can have such a detrimental affect not only to those around you but way beyond those that might seem unafected. The enron scandal was something that everyon...more

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May 29, 2008 Katherine rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book takes accounting fraud so complex that Wall Street write large didn't understand it for years and boils it down in a way that is understandable and, more surprisingly, fairly riveting. I am a bit of a junkie for this kind of story (I'd really like to be a prosecutor of white collar crime, I think), but the writers do a pretty incredible job, and given what a major issue Enron has been in our economy, in the law, and in the regulation of corporations, I think this is a worthwhile read f...more

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Jul 15, 2007 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people interested in business ethics or think smart people will make the right decisions

Detailed history of Enron from its foundation to collapse, with particular attention paid to the critical characters (Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow, etc.) Interesting if you think fall of Enron is an interesting subject (I do, but don't blame you if you don't). My biggest takeaway was the question of whether getting "the smartest guys" all together in a room will lead to good results, since it was clearly such a catastrophe in this case. And, if getting the smartest guys together in a...more

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May 31, 2007 Mathias rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: businessprofiles

Another excellent work that provides insight into how financial incentive regimes (Regulations, Markets, Competitor Behavior)influence the actions of micro-players (CEO's, divisional managers, etc) in the business world.

Enron's collapse is a case study of what can go wrong in an economic system that lacks adequate checks and balances coupled with the increasing disempowerment of other important economic actors (labor unions etc). Unfortunately whatever lessons have been learned from Enron have y...more

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Mar 23, 2012 Virgilio Pigliucci rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: business, true-story, modern

A great depiction of one of the biggest example, in modern history, of the "mafia" evolution to the highest levels, where the street violence and the low-level crime become high volume bribery and financial crimes that are capable of hitting way more people than the mob of the 70s.
I read the book in a few months... very interesting but hard to follow between so many numbers, episodes and not an easy narrative plot. When I was done with it I found the documentary on Netflix and after those 2 hour...more

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Nov 07, 2012 Kevin Rubin rated it 3 of 5 stars

"The Smartest Guys in the Room" was an interesting book, covering the rise, downfall and early aftermath of Enron. The authors aren't interested in presenting the Enron leaders as smart or skilled, and their goal seems to be to demonstrate their incompetence.

Ken Lay is portrayed as doing a good job getting Enron started as a big company, but eventually caring more for the trappings of being a big company CEO than actually doing any work. For most of the book he deals more with the philanthropy a...more

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Jan 03, 2010 asteroidbuckle rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Fans of business books

Shelves: business, true-crime

The Enron scandal is old news now. The company collapsed at the end of 2001, officially declaring bankruptcy on December 2 of that year. Up to that point, it was the biggest corporate bankruptcy filing in American history. But the fallout from the scandal continued for years afterwards. There are still creditors still trying to collect money from the now-defunct company today.

The story of Enron's meteoric rise and stunning fall is a lesson in the dark side of corporate ambition. The bottom line...more The Enron scandal is old news now. The company collapsed at the end of 2001, officially declaring bankruptcy on December 2 of that year. Up to that point, it was the biggest corporate bankruptcy filing in American history. But the fallout from the scandal continued for years afterwards. There are still creditors still trying to collect money from the now-defunct company today.

The story of Enron's meteoric rise and stunning fall is a lesson in the dark side of corporate ambition. The bottom line is that the executives running the company fell victim to their own BS; they actually believed they were smarter, more creative, and better than everyone else. They believed they could do no wrong and that they could never, ever fail. When the company collapsed, the finger-pointing began. They all blamed Andrew Fastow, the company's Chief Financial Officer. But that was too easy. Yes, Fastow created dizzingly complex financial instruments from which he greatly profited ($60.6M at last estimate), but these same instruments also helped Enron consistently acheive its earings goals each quarter. And they were created, for the most part, with the approval of both the company's top executives and the board of directors. Blaming Fastow for the whole thing was convenient, but ultimately unfair.

The real problem lay in Enron's cutthroat culture, which was introduced and nurtured by Jeff Skilling, the brilliant mind behind the company's most profitable sector, wholsale energy trading. Skilling believed in hiring the best and brightest regardless of experience and couldn't care less about the fact that all these Type A personalities created a toxic working environment. And his bottomless ambition led to increasingly foolish business practices. Skilling, by definition, was a terrible manager. By the time he became COO, then CEO, of Enron, the entire situation had gotten way out of hand. Enron was entering into ventures it had no business being in, such as broadband and water and metals. Most of these businesses were hemorrhaging money. But Enron couldn't record these losses on their balance sheet; that would lead Wall Street analysts to downgrade Enron's stock, which would cause the price to fall.

Enter Andrew Fastow. With his behind-the-scenes machinations, Enron -- which was basically a house of cards anyway -- was able to convince the analysts and the banks and the shareholders that everything was going strong by making it so that Enron's huge losses actually looked like earnings on the all-important balance sheet. Amazing, isn't it?

If course, it didn't last. The more of these off-balance-sheet "special purpose entities" were created, the less easy it was to explain them away. Once a few people started digging deeper -- to the point that the Wall Street Journal published a couple in-depth stories about Fastow, revealing his involvement in these 3rd party transactions -- that was the death knell for Enron.

In the end, Enron collapsed because it could no longer sell its own snake oil. When things were good, they were great; everyone was happy, from the executives who made millions every year to the employees who felt confident that their retirement was safely invested in Enron stock, to the accountants and lawyers and bankers and analysts who made a killing doing business with "The World's Leading Company" and therefore were hesitant to dig too deep. But when things were bad, they were terrible. When all was said and done, when Enron realized the error of its ways and wanted to make things right, it was too late. The company was $38 billion dollars in debt, with no way to pay it off. The party was over.

Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison for his part in the scandal. Fastow cut a deal and was sentenced to 6 years. Kenneth Lay, the company's founder and former CEO, was sentenced to prison time as well, but died before he could serve it. Other players pled guilty to various criminal charges and either served prison time, paid fines, or testified against the two Big Fish, Skilling and Lay (who consistently claimed to the very end that they had no idea about what was going in their company).

This book is extremely well-researched and well-written. It also reads like a novel -- at times, a suspense novel -- so there isn't an overabundance of dry prose. Some of the financial shenanigans are hard to follow, but the authors do a really good job of explaining them in basic terms that are fairly easy to understand. I had absolutely no problem getting the gist of the story despite the jargon and kept finding myself shaking my head in disbelief and muttering, "Unbeliveable,' every time I put it down.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading about how huge corporations can fall apart.(less)

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Aug 19, 2012 Evan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I am beginning to understand why there are so many novels about corporate scandal and corruption; because it is all so jaw-dropping and unreal. Enron was born from a merger of some Houston gas company and InterNorth in the 1980's. Almost from the beginning, there was corruption everywhere. As McLean points out, if you were looking for warning signs about what eventually happened, corruption could be seen by oil traders almost immediately after Enron's creation. I don't know if it was her intent,...more

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Dec 13, 2008 Kate rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you scratch your head trying figure out all of these acronyms in finance, it's worth going back and reading about some of the boys who took off-balance sheet transactions to a whole new level. So much has been written about the rise and fall of Enron, but this book does it succinctly and at a layman's level. Plus they give you the whole People magazine backstory on these traders, including the names of the strip clubs in Houston the frequented and Ken Lay's difficult childhood.

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Jan 02, 2011 DW rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to DW by: Bert

Shelves: 2007, biography-of-events, business, i-own-it, history, perspective-enhancing, politics, non-fiction

A very intensive read. It took me two months to finish it. I probably read and completed a dozen other books along side this one because you'll poke your eyes out if you read it straight through, haha. It's an amazing story. Probably not for everyone though. It's partly written like a novel and partly written like a newspaper article. Some portions are entertaining while others or written more dry, but interesting nonetheless. I did learn A LOT from reading this book. Not just about the Enron sc...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Paul M. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The unbleievable story of the energy company Enron is deetailed in this book. Their rise and fall is one of the biggest business stories of my generation. This is really a story about how greed and power can blind even the smartest of businessmen and women and it shows us a peak at the "I can do no wrong" mentality that is created in the busines world. The saddest part of this story is the fact that the lower level employees had their retirement accounts frozen while the top executives were dum...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Zack rated it 4 of 5 stars

I watched the documentary based on this book, and while it was entertaining (in a sad, "how the hell do they get away with this sort of stuff" kind of way), 110 minutes is nowhere near enough time to unwind all of the chicanery and manipulation at the heart of the Enron scandal. The book, I'm happy to say, is far more comprehensive. And yet, although dealing with potentially dense, head-scratching issues of the structuring of complex financial instruments, it manages to be a compelling, dare i s...more

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Mar 10, 2011 Nicola rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, business, library

The Smartest Guys In the Room is a well-written, well-researched attempt to unravel the financial shenanigans that led to Enron’s bankruptcy. It’s a compelling (and sometimes soapy) indictment of the worst side of business, and it queasily foreshadows the financial crisis of 2008.

I can’t say enough about how well McLean and Elkind present the material in this book, but the fact remains that (a) it’s really, really long, and (b) it’s about finance. I learned a lot about securitization (etc.) as a...more

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Aug 04, 2011 Tony Canas rated it 4 of 5 stars

This 500 page giant details the life of Enron from beginning to end along with the life of its main characters. The accounting specifics get a bit detailed at times for a lay person but the general ideas of what happened can still be understood. The guys thought they were invincible, got corrupted by power and ambition and ran a good company into the ground, to the tune of several billion dollars into the ground. The story serves as a good example of why ethics in business are so important and w...more

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May 25, 2011 RYCJ rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: my-keepers

Through clear, crisp, polished informative writing McLean and Elkind have done a fine job personifying what happened at Enron to a level that renews the deep respect I have for ‘making money.’ I recall as a child asking, “why can’t we just make money?” It seemed to be the easiest thing in the world to do. Simplicity has always been one of my models. Many years later I asked the same question in an economics class. I fully understand, and understood, the costs ‘making money’ would have on an econ...more

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Jul 21, 2012 Avadhut rated it 5 of 5 stars

http://avadhutrecommends.wordpress.com/

This one is an absolute stunner. It is better than any fast, action packed thriller. Being from the Konkan belt, the area where Enron’s most controversial Dabhol plant is located, I had a special interest in the book and it did not disappoint at all. The Smartest Guys in the Room tells the story of the incredibly fast rise of Enron and even faster demise. It’s a story that has many attributes common to other stories like Lehman Brothers, LTCM or Bear Sterns...more http://avadhutrecommends.wordpress.com/

This one is an absolute stunner. It is better than any fast, action packed thriller. Being from the Konkan belt, the area where Enron’s most controversial Dabhol plant is located, I had a special interest in the book and it did not disappoint at all. The Smartest Guys in the Room tells the story of the incredibly fast rise of Enron and even faster demise. It’s a story that has many attributes common to other stories like Lehman Brothers, LTCM or Bear Sterns but Enron is also different for the sheer bravado, audacity and recklessness of some of the main players. Also it involved a purposefully spun yarn of incredible lies – a fraud of giant magnitude.

Mclean and Elkind have done a splendid job. It’s a book written with painstaking efforts and research and it shows in their detailed chronicling of Enron saga. Enron stormed its way to the top of energy companies by changing the way the business was done. It created the market for trading energy just like any other commodity and became the most dominant player of it. Under the stewardship of COO Jeff Skilling it assembled a team of brilliant but vicious traders who were adept at exploiting the inefficiencies of the market thereby raking in millions. But while changing the industry Enron was also changing itself beyond recognition.

I think the story of Enron is the story of a culture gone horribly wrong both inside and outside the company. While creating a company heavily dependent on trading that gave eye popping profits in a shorter span instead of traditional asset heavy projects that took years to generate profit, Enron openly embraced the traders’ culture with its cut throat competition. The money was flowing freely and most of the top brass was raking in obscene amounts. With that came the opulence, scant disregard for cost control and unnecessarily heavy emphasis on deal making. The monetary rewards were tied to the big revenue numbers and it did not matter whether the project succeeded or not. Also it did not matter even if you actually spent more than your revenue as long as you met your revenue target.

Skilling’s obsession with the market and viewing Enron’s stock price as the ultimate measure of success also fuelled this short term quarter to quarter outlook and with that came the financial shenanigans – clever, complex structures created to take the debt off Enron’s balance sheet and prop up its earnings. A lie begets a lie and this manoeuvring continued, first implicitly, walking a tight rope of accounting jugglery. But soon with a CFO like Andrew Fastow in the driver’s seat who clearly took the motto “Greed is Good” to heart (though Fastow always thought otherwise), Enron crossed the line. In blatant disregard of his fiduciary duty, Fastow formed special purpose entities that dealt with Enron to take its troublesome loss making projects off its books thereby making millions for him. But all of this was soon to end. With the bursting of tech bubble and after 9/11 market tanked and along with it Enron’s stock price. The triggers that were built in the structures were activated creating liabilities far greater than Enron’s net worth. With a gigantic off balance sheet debt and left without any meaningful cash generating asset, Enron had to file for the biggest bankruptcy in history.

I highly recommend this book. It is filled with fascinating characters and is an exciting ride for those who devour mystery and drama. There is so much more to be talked about this book that I think I will have to write another post about it.(less)

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Apr 17, 2010 Kevin rated it 3 of 5 stars

In "The Smartest Guys in the Room," two Fortune business reporters show how Enron is not merely emblematic of the early 2000s corporate meltdown crisis - it's also more representative of how Corporate America functions than the well-oiled capitalist propaganda machine would ever admit. The authors provide substantial documentation to make the case that Enron was not a "bad seed" in the business world (though perhaps it was a particularly brazen one), but rather that it got away with its antics d...more

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Mar 31, 2013 Erika Johansen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Bethany McLean (with her co-writers) has a real gift for taking a complicated financial tsunami and laying bare where it started, how it snowballed, and how it crashed on the shore. I'm not a finance person, so I understood only vaguely what had gone on at Enron. This book lays it all out and makes it into an interesting story as well, filled with fascinating characters and good old-fashioned themes like hubris, neither of which are lessened by the fact that the story is true. I find that McLean...more

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May 20, 2012 Leah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very well-researched and detailed book, sometimes too detailed. It's pretty well-written, but I gave it three stars because you can really get bogged down in the all the financial mumbo-jumbo. It's also kind of exhausting to read because you will be irritated by how arrogant and stupid the Enron leaders were, and as they make the same mistakes over and over, it's easy to lose interest as a reader. If you are someone who really likes reading about financial markets and business, though, this will...more

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Jun 09, 2012 Vikas rated it 5 of 5 stars

Amazing detailed narrative on Enron's rise and fall. Its a roller-coster ride, gives you a detailed account of how Enron got buildup and how its shady practises when unravelled led to its fall like a pack of cards.

It wasnt just Enron who was gaming the system through its nefarious practises, but it was nexus of the company, the ausitors, the bankers and even for a good time SEC ignored what was happening at Enron. Its a stroy of self-believing but overconfident executives like Ken Lay, Jeff Skil...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Heidi Kolesaric rated it 5 of 5 stars

I decided to read this book due to two of my professors (Accounting & Business classes) briefly mentioning the Enron scandal in several lectures. I guess my curiosity got the best of me & I wanted to know more.

Well, this book did it for me. I could have a full on conversation with someone about Enron now & I wasn't even old enough to know what was going on during the time it happened!

I love the way McLean wrote this book. I feel if any one else tackled this subject & created a bo...more

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Apr 25, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

There were dozens of books about Watergate, but only All the President's Men gave readers the full story, with all the drama and nuance and exclusive reporting. And thirty years later, if you're going to read only one book on Watergate, that's still the one. Today, Enron is the biggest business story of our time, and Fortune senior writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind are the new Woodward and Bernstein.

Remarkably, it was just two years ago that Enron was thought to epitomize a great New Econo...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Tim Smith rated it 5 of 5 stars

Surprised myself by getting really into this. Excellent airplane reading.

The authors do a great job of painting a portrait of the people behind Enron and their foibles while doing the same thing for the financial structures they were inventing alongside. I'd break with some of the other reviews in wishing for a little more technical detail in spots (I'm fascinated by the Death Star and Ricochet ploys on the California energy market) but I'm an engineer and a lost cause anyway; overall I thought...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Maura rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fic

ok, the only reason i picked this up was because I saw Bethany talk at the Williams Math reunion last month. I figured why not expand my horizons in support of a former classmate? i figured i'd read part of it and then my brain (which hates financials and business talk and that sort of thing) would shut down and i'd return it to the library. instead, i ended up renewing it so that I could finish this 400 page tome. I'm not going to say that everyone should read it -- however, if you were conside...more

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Feb 09, 2012 Rsheppar rated it 4 of 5 stars

The one great thing about this book is its not necessarily about accounting or business, but more about the people behind the scandal. Bethany McLean did her research (it was her analysis of the company's Cash Flow Statement and her article about it in Fortune that brought attention to the company's fraud). She delves deep into what made Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay tick,and although having a background in accounting will help, you dont need to be a business whiz to understand what went on b...more

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Apr 21, 2010 Kimftw rated it 5 of 5 stars

Well written like Warren buffet quoted saying is the best description. If you get bored with the way they explain what Enron did to get around laws and loop holes then this book is not for you. It's a lot about how they wrote financial schemes to meet quarters end. Then again if you weren't interested in that I'm guessing you wouldn't have picked up the book?

Its a good book, worth reading. Very long! Before i got to half the book i felt like it could have ended fine just there, but I'm I guess...more

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Mar 26, 2009 Omar rated it 5 of 5 stars

Everyone knows Enron collapsed, everyone knows they were crooks, but the real story is so complicated and almost no one knows the actual details of the fraud. As opposed to Worldcom and Tyco where the frauds were actually relatively simple (capitalizing expenses instead of booking them) Enron was a massive scheme where its hard to say any one person knew just how extensive but very easy to say everyone (and I mean every single employee) knew something was going on. This book breaks it down in a...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Elizabeth Reuter rated it 4 of 5 stars

General statements about the US financial crisis and corruption in big business are easy to refute. I can talk generally corporate corruption, but it's easy for someone to reply, "corporations make jobs" and "you're stereotyping big businesses."

So, it's necessary to get into specifics. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room goes into Enron's history to tell us about the men (and a couple of women) who built the famous company from nothing only to destroy it with greed and arrogance.

It's an aston...more General statements about the US financial crisis and corruption in big business are easy to refute. I can talk generally corporate corruption, but it's easy for someone to reply, "corporations make jobs" and "you're stereotyping big businesses."

So, it's necessary to get into specifics. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room goes into Enron's history to tell us about the men (and a couple of women) who built the famous company from nothing only to destroy it with greed and arrogance.

It's an astonishing story. The book prints notes from the government to Enron's CEO that read, "Please keep making us millions." It tells how Enron manipulated energy in California, treating the situation as a giant game while millions went without power and hundreds lost their jobs. It reveals how Enron cooked its books to look legitimate while losing money.

It also talks about those in charge; and the level of delusion they shared is remarkable. These are people who believed an idea was the most precious thing, even if it lost money, and so they destroyed honest, money-making businesses to make way for increasingly crooked schemes, patting themselves on the back for their brilliance as they went. Even as Enron collapsed they couldn't see the truth, because they were so convinced of their own infallibility, and the stupidity of everyone else. Even after being caught no one at Enron seemed to understand that they were in trouble. Didn't everyone yelling get how special they were?

Smartest Guys in the Room is a gripping read, with the exception of two chapters devoted to breaking down the economics of crooked Enron deals. However, said two chapters will probably be more interesting to people with a greater head for numbers than I have, and I understand why those chapters were necessary. As I said above, it's not good enough to say "Enron was corrupt" and leave it at that. If people don't know how Enron and their collaborators stole so much money, how can anyone make a good argument about corruption on Wall Street or weaknesses in the justice system? That McLean and Elkind managed to shove all the boring facts into just a couple chapters and make everything else so fascinating is testament to their talent as writers.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a good read for just about anyone interested in real life crime drama or economics.

Elizabeth Reuter
-Author, Demon of Renaissance Drive(less)

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Jan 15, 2012 Brian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: business-finance

The Smartest Guys in the Room provides a comprehensive overview of the people behind the meltdown at Enron and the ideas that led a once great company to ruin. It is a story of greed, manipulation and egos that drove some of the "smartest" people in business to extraordinary ends. This book does assume a great deal of knowledge on financial tools and gets technical in its overview but having read several books on Enron this is one of the better ones. From the personality battles under Skilling i...more

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May 19, 2012 Adam Ware rated it 2 of 5 stars

An interesting account of the history of Enron and - at the very end - a bit about the scandal itself. I appreciated it from a historical perspective, but I did not like the moralistic spin that the authors employed throughout the book. I found the book's tone to be self-righteous, and the use of sarcasm (usually employed when expressing amazement at Enron's carelessness) to be unprofessional. The authors also took an almost omniscient view of the events being discussed, even going so far as to...more An interesting account of the history of Enron and - at the very end - a bit about the scandal itself. I appreciated it from a historical perspective, but I did not like the moralistic spin that the authors employed throughout the book. I found the book's tone to be self-righteous, and the use of sarcasm (usually employed when expressing amazement at Enron's carelessness) to be unprofessional. The authors also took an almost omniscient view of the events being discussed, even going so far as to describe what was going on in the heads of Jeff Skilling (COO) and Kenneth Lay (CEO). When the authors pretended to know something that is certainly unknowable, I could only react by reading more skeptically.

In my view, the actions of the individuals involved were very questionable, but probably only illegal in concert. For example, Andrew Fastow (the CFO) created off-balance sheet financing through the use of Special Purpose Entities that was probably not permissible under GAAP, but Arthur Anderson and Enron's audit committee signed off on it. So who is really to blame? Fastow? Anderson? Enron's board? The answer is not as simple as the authors pretended. That is why I think it was a gross oversimplification for the book to cast so many of the people involved as criminals. The authors fell victim to some serious Monday morning quarterbacking, assuming that the various players were actively and knowingly deceiving shareholders, when in reality they likely had little or no knowledge of what was actually happening outside their own small circle of influence.

Finally - and there's no way to say with without being obnoxious - as a former accountant I thought the book could have been more technical. When faced with explaining a complex accounting issue, the authors often fell back on words like "convoluted" or "byzantine" without really explaining anything. That said, I can appreciate that technical accounting discussions would have confused, or, worse yet, bored most readers.

My advice: if you want to know about the Enron scandal, just read the Wikipedia article. (less)

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About Bethany McLean

Bethany McLean is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine, and known for her work on the Enron scandal. She had been an editor at large and columnist for Fortune magazine.
McLean grew up in Hibbing and received her BA in English and mathematics at Williams College in 1992. After college and prior to joining Fortune, she worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs.

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