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Summary: Corporate Character
Review: The authors describe a complicated critical mass of personalities that caused the Enron meltdown. McLean and Elkind have written a book about human behavior in a pressure cooker where top dogs vie for power. Enron executives cannibalized their own company with Wall Street's help. Financial engineering may have assisted these people, but their willingness to do it in the first place is a question of character. I also recommend a book that explains how structured finance can be used to funnel money out of companies and which explains Enron's disguised loans: Tavakoli's "Collateralized Debt Obligations and Structured Finance."
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Summary: Ethics in Biz - it sells!!!
Review: Great book!!! Luckily I did not miss the story as I always read articles by Beth Mclean in Fortune. When the book was published I could not wait to order it via Amazon... Again, this book contributes invaluable things to learn, how we need ethics in business more than just follow the rules... Bravo,
Imam Soeseno
Bogor, Indonesia
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Summary: Human Frailty and Corporate Failure
Review: The authors have done a masterful job of describing the critical mass of complicated personalities that contributed to the Enron meltdown. McLean and Elkind are keenly perceptive about human nature at its worst, and paint colorful portraits of the personalities of Enron's top honchos. The behavior of Enron executives jockeying for position at the expense of their corporation is infuriating. Ripping off the investors is bad enough, but some of the executives cannibalized their own company with Wall Street's help. Financial engineering may have assisted these people, but their willingness to do it in the first place is a question of character. McLean and Elkind do a masterful job of implying the contributing elements of lack of character. This is a well written and fascinating book. This is not so much a book about finance as it is a book about human behavior in a social crucible where power and high rewards are at stake. This book will become a classic in business school ethics courses and organizational behavior courses. "Collateralized Debt Obligations and Structured Finance" by Tavakoli will become the textbook of choice for any graduate school developing a course in this subject. It's clever in explaining structured finance including Enron's disguised loans. The author gives reasons why investment banks and sureties who aided Enron had their own failings in how they distributed internal social rewards. It's a structured finance text that warns against and suggests defenses to this kind of behavior and starts out saying that one should expect fraud and be prepared to diffuse it.
Rating: 
Summary: A pre-review
Review: I admit, I have not read this book. I have read all the other Enron books and I would have read this one, except that I read the excerpts in Fortune magazine before the book was released. Based in part on my own knowledge about the general subject (not Enron itself, but the various deal types and practices in general) I found the Fortune article to be little more than name calling, not backed up with explanation, analysis, or evidence. People in search of a good story may find it to be fun, but I was turned off by what seemed to me to be yet more sensationalism at the cost pf professionalism. Again, I have not actually read the book, only the "teaser" article.
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Summary: I had no interest in the subject
Review: 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.
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Summary: Should Have Been Subtitled "Arrogance and Greed"
Review: I've been in the oil business in Houston for three decades, and I've encountered to varying degrees all the types who, per accounts in this fine book, happened to come together at just the right time to construct a commercial illusion from whole cloth, then reach a point where everything implodes simply from not being real. I've met the Visionary who initates such an operation as Enron, a new concept in the gas business -- the wonderful old fellow with the big idea, who soon loses specific interest in the firm's primary focus because he wants to become a beloved star of society. And then the Mighty Executive who, by sheer willpower and domination of personality, forces things to happen (valid results, at first -- then, later, desired quarterly financial outcomes, achieved by cooking the books). This is the sort who can be absolutely charming in front of a group, then alter into an arrogant, self-centered and total jerk when one-on-one behind closed doors. My favorite experience with this type involved meeting with one about some extremely sensitive company matters, hunched over a desk together for nearly an hour. That same afternoon, I passed him in a hallway and said "Hello," and he just walked past as if I were empty air, ignoring me completely. Jerk. The next piece of slime from the bottom of this septic tank is the Wheeler-Dealer Weasel, the adroit CFO who, if he would dedicate to legitimate business pursuits mere FRACTION of the energy and thought he applies to concocting shifty schemes and tricks, would be globally admired. This sort is the greedy self-promoter who always has some sort of angle going, primarily aimed at cutting himself in for a piece of the action. Another component in this excrement mosaic is the Weasel's Little Lackey, the slightly-lower-level accounting type who acts as front man for the Wheeler-Dealer's indecipherable schemes. These four dudes from Enron deserve hard time, they deserve a couple of decades in the pen, they deserve to be poor as church mice for the rest of their lives, begging their mere subsistence with no chance of ever again owning as much as $100 all at once -- they deserve to be squalid paupers for the duration of their miserable worthless little lives. Others involved, whom we must thank, are the investment bankers and the CPA who inhaled all the smoke these four were blowing. The accounting firm that lost its license fully deserved to do so -- they were drunk and blinded by large fees from Enron, and were not NEARLY confrontational enough. I don't know if the head auditor on the account deserves jail -- I don't know if he was criminal, but he was definitely incompetent, completely failing in the vital outside-auditor attest function, simply polishing every apple the Enron criminals handed to him. This appraisal sounds appalled and bitter. You can only IMAGINE how it would have been phrased, if I had been one of the many unfortunate souls who lost everything due to the criminal actions of these four corporate low-lifes and their banker/CPA co-conspirators. Let's hope those four end up completely impoverished, as soon as possible.
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Summary: Nice job
Review: I spent all my reading time for several days focussing exclusively on this book. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind do an excellent job of portraying the executives involved in a human light. I felt like I knew some of these people, especially Jeff Skilling, after I had finished. Style and tone are punchy and refreshingly consistent; these guys know how to write. My only problem lies in the explanations of the complex financial transactions. Often I wished for more detail or a better exposition on some of the intricate deals.
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Summary: The Best of the Enron Books
Review: As a former energy merchant employee and power/gas deal structurer who watched the collapse of Enron and so many others in the industry from the "inside," this text gives accurately portrays key features to Enron's demise: (1) the amazing and ingenius personalities involved, (2) the development of a complex industry, (3) political, market, regulatory, and accounting/tax dynamics that enabled and facilitated manipulation, and (4) unstoppable greed. I concur when several other readers when they point out that this text is dense and highly technical. This Enron book is best suited for those who already have a background the energy, financial, and trading industry. If the terms "stack and roll," "Henry Hub," "take or pay," or "back-to-back" are foreign to the reader, the book may seem tedious and boring. If the above terms are familiar and sources of interest, this book is for you.
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Summary: A Remarkable Study of Corporate Collapse
Review: This book gets to the heart of the matter of Enron. It tells you enough about the people to understand the corporate culture and the personal motivations. Enron was a mix of things that just continued to spiral. It's all about money, of course. Even the people who weren't so caught up in the meltdown, who left, were in it for the money. At some level it reaches a point of absurdity. As Lew Black demands, "What were these people going to do, start their own space program?" But this is a remarkable book. There were various personalities. Many were out of the conservative Midwest traditions. I can't draw any real conclusions as to why they could throw this all overboard, but all these people get into a mode where they work hard, very hard, but that's about all that they retain of traditional values. They don't see their work in a broad context or relate it to any community but themselves. It's a terrible, corrosive process that eats away at them. There's an internal mystery about these people. What did they really want? Who were they trying to impress? How did they come to give their souls to the notion of meeting earnings expectation on Wall Street, and thereby cashing out their options? How did all other measures of corporate performance get abandoned? And this isn't just Enron. Enron took things to the limit, but they played within the rules. The Wall Street rules. What we got from this period was worthless stock, excess power capacity, severe economic dislocation in California, and so on. Basically, greed wasn't good, and it didn't motivate people to do good things. But these were incredibly flawed people in an incredibly flawed system. The government looks almost as bad as the corporations. All the people were flawed. If they were hard driving and street smart, they survived Enron because they got out early. So they knew how long to milk the cow, but that's about all you can say, at least measuring their nobility. The bad people are truly bad. Their basic assumptions are bad. Their values are, well, silly. Being clever is important, to the point of atomic self-destruction. Others were motivated by status. On the surface, Lay was a man devoted to charity, but it was a thin gloss of altruism on a truly corrupt core. This is a sad book because these people were successful and often came up through the obvious path to success, the big schools. What do these schools do to produce people who are a little more rounded? It's hard to believe that any corporation with a structure and culture like Enron can be kept on track. Did the recent reforms really do anything to prevent future Enrons? If the corporate structure of Enron had been more traditional, it would have been restrained. If the people had a more balanced view of personal and social responsibility, it never would have happened. If the regulators had maintained control, it might have been clipped. If accountants had imposed normal discipline on the company, the worst abuses would not have happened. But on and on, down the line, nothing curbed the excess. So what level of reform is required?
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Summary: Enron - a nuclear waste
Review: Of all the books that have been published thus far, this was the most enlightening and the best researched. As the authors have adroitly pointed out, the problems with Enron did not begin in 2001 but rather had their systemic beginnings in the early days of incorporation with the first fiasco - Valhalla. The intrigue of this downfall is why it never happened sooner. With paper revenues and off-paper debt, it is quite remarkable the company made 15 years. The authors have done a yeoman job on deciphering a very, convoluted and intentionally convoluted structural system. Now if the authors would kindly explain to all of us how we avoid working and investing in companies that harbor these types of self-appointed smarty-pants.
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