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

by Bethany McLean

What thrilled Skilling, always, was the intellectual purity of an idea, not the translation of that idea into reality. “Jeff Skilling is a designer of ditches, not a digger of ditches,” an Enron executive said years later. He was often too slow—even unwilling—to recognize when the reality didn’t match the theory.

When it comes to executing their lofty theories, well, consultants lean toward leaving those messy realities to the companies themselves.

no company can prosper over the long term if every employee is a free agent, motivated solely by greed, no matter how smart he is. No company can function if it only hires brilliant MBAs—and sets them against each other. There is a reason companies value team players, just as there’s a reason that people who get along with others tend to do well in corporate life. The reason is simple: you can’t build a company on brilliance alone. You need people who can come up with ideas, and you also need people who can implement those ideas and are well compensated for doing so.

For all of Skilling’s public bravado about how great everything was at Enron, he spent most of his time dealing with a host of serious problems, the part of the job he had always despised. Part of