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

by Bethany McLean

It was also a veritable sham. The war room had been rapidly fitted out explicitly to impress the analysts. Though EES was then just gearing up, Skilling and Pai had staged it all to convince their visitors that things were already hopping. On the day the analysts arrived, the room was filled with Enron employees. Many of them, though, didn’t even work on the sixth floor. They were secretaries, EES staff from other locations, and non-EES employees who had been drafted for the occasion and coached on the importance of appearing busy. One, an administrative assistant named Kim Garcia, recalls being told to bring her personal photos to make it look as if she actually worked at the desk where she was sitting; she spent most of the time talking to her girlfriends on the phone. After getting the all-clear signal, Garcia packed up her belongings and returned to her real desk on the ninth floor. The analysts had no clue they’d been hoodwinked.