The Smartest Guys in the Room

Many of my writing assignments pertain to accounting and compliance issues. Reading this book about what all went wrong at Enron helps me understand why various compliance acts and various accounting rules changes were enacted since 2001.

A must read for anybody interested in corporate culture and the true behind the scenes environment of corporate America and the Wall Street enablers that allow such events to take place. Well written page turner.

I loved this book. The writing style of the authors was great, and kept me interested even during some of the more technical passages. The authors focus a lot on the key players (Lay, Skilling, Fastow, etc.) which I enjoyed. Enron had been discussed in several of my college courses, so I wanted to learn more about what had happened. By the end of the book I actually felt a little bit of sympathy for Skilling and Lay, given how hard they had worked throughout their lives. This book does a great job of identifying the corrupt practices that went, and the pressures that caused them.

This is a scrupulously detailed account of Enron's house of cards that survived far too long and now serves as a case study at most business schools. Yes, it is long and sometimes tedious reading but it serves as the definitive word on the Enron debacle. Particularly timely now with the high profile trial scheduled for later this month and a highly praised DVD on the subject near release.

I really enjoyed reading this book about the raise and fall of Enron. The authors described the main players really well, and went into great detail about the main events when Enron went from a tiny gas pipeline company to a great power house which included gas trading , power trading, broadband operator and so on. The book was exciting!

What a great book! As you read about another unethical, greedy, unbelievable thing these guys did or permitted, you will think to yourself there is no way they could top that one. Wrong! The book promises and delivers cover to cover, with in-depth explanations of technical business topics explaining the demise of a company caused by a sociopathic solidarity justified as an organizational culture. A lot of similar themes with the book "The New, New Thing" about Silicon Valley in the 1990s. One of the best reads of the year.

This is a really great read, a fascinating story. I have no interest in reading more about Enron, but I would have missed a terrific book if a friend hadn't nagged me to try this. So I will pass on the nag -- try it, you will learn and be entertained.

A very important read for anyone who wonders what's happening to our country. The hubris of the players, MBAs (the "Smart Guys"), in this story defy reality as they game the system while kowtowing to Wall Street and lining their own pockets. They took deregulation of utilities as the kick-off for their schemes by massaging and manipulating the industry and government rules to show Las Vegas, er - Wall Street, their "cooked" bottom lines with creative accounting and approvals or "looking the other way" from their attorneys. The upshots of their playing were higher prices and blackouts for their customers and scamming their own employees. As any member of the working class who cannot afford tax accountants and attorneys can testify - "The rich get richer, the poor get assistance, and the working slobs get stiffed." Like "Free Lunch", this book exposes the criminal and opportunistic side of human nature of those who capitalize on governmental and organizational bureaucracies, leaving our country in its current financial black hole.

My only issue with this well-researched and documented piece was the mind-boggling amount of acronyms and initialed abbreviations used throughout the book, making it difficult to deal with atop of tackling and trying to digest the myriad accounting and legal practices and procedures, i.e., it was a hard read for one who is not a lawyer, CPA, or MBA.

This book was informative and very well-written. Almost read like a mystery--very well-paced and held my interest until the very end. The reporters did a great job of digging down into the details that should have been caught by Enron's board of directors, bankers and analysts.

I started reading this when performing social network analysis on the Enron email dataset, to give me some background into whether or not we were detecting the "bad guys". I had no idea I would find the book such a fascinating read! Extremely well-written and deeply researched, it has had me gripped since the first page. Highly recommended.

This book is an excellent read on corporate culture in America and a useful primer of the dangers of GAAP accounting practices like mark to market pricing of assets. This book tells a fascinating tale of the characters who first built and then ultimately destroyed Enron, taking $38B of investor money with them in the process. The book does get slow at times, and the level of detail requires patience and frequent page flips to keep straight.

Bethany McLean, from northern Minnesota, was the only guy in the room paying attention during ENRON and during the Wall Street financial crisis.

We should replace all of us guys with women like her: the world would be so much better.

Great copy, perfect service.

GREAT STORY ABOUT HUMAN FOLLY, AMBITION AND CRUELTY. FORMIDABLE ACCOUNT OF HOW VERY BRIGHT PEOPLE- OR SOCIETY?- WENT AWRY. BE PREPARED TO RE-READ SOME CHAPTERS IN ORDER TO REALLY UNDERSTAND HOW DEALS WERE COOKED.

This should be required reading in accounting courses, business ethics classes, as well as for people studying to get Masters In Business Administration degrees. However, it is also interesting enough for the lay reader too. The authors are masterful at taking complex accounting arrangements, and making them understandable. The reader is introduced to each of Enron's key players, and the authors humanize them. Enron is a great tragedy, but it is not just the fault of the corporate CEOs. Credit Rating Agencies, giant banks, stock analysts, accounting firms, law firms, and regulatory agencies are at fault too. A very enjoyable book.

pretty good book regarding the details of enron. Not my usual type of book, but I've always found the case interesting and so I wanted to read more about it. I don't know if I'd read it a 2nd time, but it would be useful if I needed to write a paper on it. Only negative is that it didn't come in kindle version.

This was a drawn out, detailed account of the Enron scandal. The book was a long read and the details presented with amazing. It is hard to conceive of the amount of research that went into this book. Even as detailed as it is it was an interesting and entertaining book. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in business ethics, cooperate scandals or to understand what lead to the Enron collapse. Very good book.

An education on how Enron got to its climatic fall. After a class in finance, this was a story to support the theories we studied. It got three stars since I am not one for longer books on a business subject. I will finish it to see how it ends.

This book provides an easy to understand analysis of the decline and fall of Enron, and the causes behind it. The book is written so that anyone with at least a relative grasp of the rudimentary basics of Economics would be able to comprehend what is written, but is not written so simplistically as to bore an economist. I would highly recommend this book for undergraduate economics students, and especially to people who desire to go into financial regulation.

An education on how Enron got to its climatic fall. After a class in finance, this was a story to support the theories we studied. It got three stars since I am not one for longer books on a business subject. I will finish it to see how it ends.

This book provides an easy to understand analysis of the decline and fall of Enron, and the causes behind it. The book is written so that anyone with at least a relative grasp of the rudimentary basics of Economics would be able to comprehend what is written, but is not written so simplistically as to bore an economist. I would highly recommend this book for undergraduate economics students, and especially to people who desire to go into financial regulation.

Really enjoyed this book. McLean doesn't just present the facts, but instead tells an entertaining story about the various individuals and groups involved in Enron. She give's a lot of background into each party (e.g. Skilling's rise from poverty and his distinguished career at McKinsey before joining Enron).

Highly recommend you give this book a read.

This book is packed with juicy details about everything Enron. Which is great if you want every single detail. If you want more of a summary--this is not the book for you.

To start, please know it is 400 pages of small print with almost no margins. It could easily be 500 or 600 pages.

Why so long? Because the author walks you through the origin story of every single player and department of Enron. The book spends forever developing these characters. Do you need/want to have a deep understanding of the personality and character of an Enron employee that left 10 years before the implosion that was not really that influential to the fraud? This book will spend 15 pages doing just that.

Just know that what you are buying here is the most comprehensive version of the Enron story possible. I'd imagine Enron executives have read this and learned many things they did not know about.

Anyone who wants to understand more about what took place at Enron leading to their rapid rise and equally rapid fall. Arguably the smartest guys in the room, but at the end of the day subject to the same human short comings underscored in the stories of Drexel Burnham, Salomon Bros, Bear Sterns, Lehman, etc.

The afterword nicely ties the Enron case together with financial crisis in 2008-2009. I recommend this book for anyone in the financial industry as a lesson in the slippery slope ethics in our world are perched on.