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The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron | |||||||||
 
| 80% Recommended by our customers. Publisher: Portfolio Trade Catalog: Book Release date: 2004-09-28 Media: Paperback Number of pages: 464 Ean: 9781591840534 Book Isbn: 1591840538  Tip: compare prices with similar booksAuthors:
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 Written on March 8, 2007 Summary: Pigs get fat, hogs get sloppy. This book does a terrific job describing how the people at the top of Enron took corporate malfeasance to a new level. This book puts in plain language who the actors involved are, what happened, and how people let it happened. It is a must read for any Californian interested in knowing why brown-outs came to be, anyone interested in deregulating energy companies, former investors of Enron (myself included) who want to know how their money disappeared, and pretty much most other Americans too. Written on March 3, 2007 Summary: Barbarians in the Accounting Department 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, the received propriety of the business and financial community was ipso facto different - if it had not been, given the market-wide (if unwitting) "complicity" documented by this book - Enron *simply couldn't have happened*. If we assume that, in the context of the markets, "received propriety" is really no more than fiscal prudence - aimed at making sure people don't needlessly mislead, deceive or unfairly disadvantage each other (and is enforced by short sellers as effectively as regulators), 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 the prevailing, Post-Enron economic mores which could allow a disaster on a similar scale to happen again? That's the 300 pound gorilla that all the post-facto moralisers (and they are as prevalent within the investment banking community as without it) will never address. 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 Written on February 5, 2007 Summary: Could not put this book down This book grabs you from the get-go with the details of the Cliff Baxter suicide in the introduction. It is a heart pounding page turner from that point on. Sometimes the technical explanations of some very complex accounting machinations might have you reading and re-reading the same passages, and you might not completely understand some of the high level concepts, but stick with it. The authors did an amazing job of making the characters and culture at Enron come alive. Written on January 29, 2007 Summary: Laws Can't Create Fair Play After 50 pages you will feel like you need to take a shower - such was the nature of the things you begin to learn went on. After 100 pages you feel as though you absolutely know enough - you now "get" the Enron mess. And you certainly know more than anyone you will meet in life's normal situations. But now you're hooked. The book becomes a page turner. What's gonna happen next? How much more convoluted can this company become? How much more denial can the execuatives live with? And how will it all come unglued? All those questions and more are answered. Wonderfully written. Simplifies a complex mess down into elements we all can understand. My take away? As a society we can never live by laws alone. Morality and fair play must be felt inside each of us for our society to thrive an survive. The Enron guys took the attitude that if a law was not broken in its most technical form, then nothing wrong was done. Silly. Incorrect. And thank fortune justice was served - though way too late. Written on January 9, 2007 Summary: Easy to Read, Easy to Understand Well organized and clearly presented, it makes a fun read and, believe it or not, it's exciting too. |
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| Catalog | Book | Book | Book | Book | Book |
| Release date | 2004-09-28 | 2001-10-09 | 1990-10-01 | 2005-12-27 | 2008-10-28 |
| Media | Paperback | Paperback | Paperback | Paperback | Hardcover |
| Number of pages | 464 | 288 | 256 | 784 | 592 |
| Ean | 9781591840534 | 9780375758256 | 9780140143454 | 9780767911795 | 9780061655548 |
| Book Isbn | 1591840538 | 0375758259 | 0140143459 | 0767911792 | 0061655546 |
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