Rating: 
Summary: Enron-eous
Review: Deregulation of the natural gas markets in the 1980's introduced uncertainty and volatility to energy prices. Gas producers and consumers sought ways to hedge unpredictable costs and variable supply. Enron's contribution was to develop customized contracts that met the needs of the market, broker the deals as an intermediary, or act as a party to the contract. Offering the contracts on the internet was another innovative plus for what had been a sleepy Houston utility. Not by chance, CEO Ken Lay was an economist and student of market dynamics. If the strategy made money in the gas industry, why not expand it to other areas in need of a market maker to control risk. Authors Fusaro and Miller see a company mesmerized with its ability to to be that key market maker in an expanding range of areas that would include water supply, pollution credits, weather-related risks, etc. And why not export the strategy to other countries. So, Fusaro and Miller see hubris at work, a company arrogantly moving beyond its core competency in energy matters. For them it is primarily a market story. There are some brief observations about Enron's hothouse work culture and morality in the markets. But in the end, the authors' view of Enron is that of a company that created a market and was crushed by it. Debt, competition, inadequate planning, and the loss of investor confidence brought them to bankruptcy helped by a few, dubious 'special purpose entity' (SPE) deals. They may be right. But what will occupy the courts for years will be the less abstract tales of greed, fraud, and dereliction of duty. There is the sad failure of auditor Arthur Andersen to function in its role as, well, auditor. Also: I can find no comment on the board of directors (What they didn't do and why they didn't). WHAT WENT WRONG at ENRON is a less than complete picture of the matter, but it does provide a perspective that saves us from puzzling over Enron's explanations of its SPE's, the company's filings and footnotes that strangle meaning, and the ethical failings of desperate people.
Rating: 
Summary: Lacks specifics, too many pointless analogies.
Review: Enron's greed and financial scandals, along with the rise and fall, are interesting in itself. This book, though it does explain the fall and is easily readable, isn't intriguing enough to capture the reader's attention. In fact, more than half is a description of how Enron came to be and what there business model is. A chunk of the book is just photocopied evidence pasted in the appendix. Only a minute section describes the scandal and accounting frauds.The author loves anologies. He devotes pages to baseball card trading, and then sort of compares it to Enron's business. While these analogies help with understanding the business model, it's often over-simplified with a glaring lack of details. What I found was a lack of hard numbers and statistics which meant I couldn't put the failings into perspective. Also, the first half of the book where he details Enron, he seems to be praising their business, then hand wavingly, he points to a few corrupted examples. It almost appears that the author thinks Enron would still be a powerhouse if it wasn't for a few specific incidents. As a book, it gets the job done. It shows the errors of Enron in a way that any non financial person could understand. It does tend to oversimplify, and it's glaring lack of numbers and details hurt it in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't Add Much
Review: Having read many newspaper and magazine accounts of the fall of Enron, including excellent coverage in The New York Times and BusinessWeek, this book really doesn't add much. It's a concise retelling of the events, so that's nice. But it imparts no greater understanding or context. Among the problems: The writing is bland. The book gives almost no explanation for Enron's rise before the calamitous fall. It never makes clear exactly why Enron had to go bankrupt. This account spends hardly any time on Arthur Andersen's role, even thought it led to that accounting firm's ruin. The authors also have an odd obsession with Michael Milken, even though he seems peripheral to the Enron story. If you've missed the news in the past seven months, this book can quickly give you the outline of the Enron saga. Otherwise, save your money.
Rating:
Summary: Not for Everyone as the author states.
Review: I had to read this book for a Finance class in college. It is an interesting and entertaining look at how Enron fell because of deeply corrupt business practices. However, the author does not explain many of the business terms and ventures as well as he should have, with a title that states it should be readable for everyone. It is not overly complex, but you should have some background in business to truly understand some of the ways that Enron messed up. Nevertheless, this is a well-written book that tells an astonishing story. It is unbelievable that the people who were in power at Enron were so bold.
Rating:
Summary: Lacking substance
Review: I suppose this book provides a decent overview of what happened at Enron (this could be accomplished in much less than the 150 large print small pages it takes the authors), but the complete lack of depth left me feeling a little like I might after reading the box score of a baseball game. I rather suspect the primary reason for the lack of depth in this book is a desire to get it in print as soon as possible. I do not recommend this book for anyone who really wants to understand what happened at Enron.
Rating: 
Summary: Every CPA should read and understand this book.
Review: I thought I understood accounting, until Enron. Where was the Board? The Lawyers? The Auditors?
Excellent documentary. Fascinating reading.
Rating:
Summary: The Investors' Guide to Enron
Review: Let me start by admitting that I lost a tidy sum of money in the whole Enron disaster and would be happy never to see that word again. Then I saw Richard Pachter's rave review of this book in the Miami Herald and figured that maybe I could learn something from reading it. I had no idea of some of the things that Enron up to (criminal problems as far back as the 1980s) and the authors do an excellent job of fitting all the pieces together. I only wish that someone could for once write a book like this before disaster strikes.
Rating:
Summary: Thin
Review: Let's start with the positives:
- the book is easy to read and reasonably well written;
- the basic facts of the story are covered;
- the book starts the story way back before the problems emerged so that you get a feel for what the business was up to. But
- it is very short book for such a complex subject
- the "unravelling" - the investigations into "what went wrong" are (ironically) not well covered
- there is almost no coverage of the Andersen issues So save your dollar, pound, euro or yen - don't waste it on this book.
Rating:
Summary: What went wrong at Enron
Review: The book was thrown together. The author wanted to be a first mover in the marketplace that analyzed what went wrong at Enron. However, the author neglected to mention in detail and explain how off balance sheet special purpose entities were Enron's demise. This is a waste of time and money to read.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, clear and factual
Review: This book includes original documentation of the Enron mess including Cliff Baxter's suicide note. Baxter was about the only high-ranking figure to preserve any sense that Enron's monkeyshines were unethical. His suicide has not been fully resolved to be indeed a suicide and, as the authors of this book point out, the note is in block letters. Block letters MAY have been used to conceal something darker and about the same time they were used by the Anthrax mailer. I do not mean to imply anything unprovable. That's because I am well aware that at a certain level we despair of getting at the truth about the behavior of people with power, from OJ Simpson to the JFK assassination. But what is in plain view is a breakdown in trust. The ability of Enron to construct a financial fantasy, in which debt was off-loaded to new entities constructed at light speed, is not something that could be done with manual technology, or implemented by lower-level and midlevel personnel with job security. Starting with OMB director David Stockman's use of a primitive facility of the first spreadsheet (Visicalc) to present a "balanced" budget to President Reagan which then deprived social and welfare agencies of funding in midyear, automated technology has enabled the transformation of accounting into literature. Unfortunately, what was produced was not odes or haikus. Instead, people with 401Ks during the Nineties actually believed their future to be secure for a change, only to find themselves the victims of a fictional narrative. This is because the degringolade happens quite fast, in modern systems, in reverse. This book shows the dangers of the "employment at will" doctrine. In the 1980s during the first wave of downsizing, metro newspapers had a large number of ads from law firms promising redress in case of termination. These ads have disappeared because the appeals bar, in the 1990s, rescusitated the old doctrine that the law is not interested in an unfair termination, except in cases of racial discrimination...with age discrimination gradually falling from favor as realistically actionable. One member of the Federal bench, Richard Posner, wrote an essay around this time in defense of employment at will and in response to a legal scholar's attempt to show that a less arm's length relationship made for stronger families and communities. One gets the sense from most of Posner's writings that, quite over the heads of the ordinary people at Enron, a sort of Euro style *KulturKampf* was being conducted. By the time of Enron's hey-day, termination could not be questioned and was a managed process at most companies. Books about how to handle termination described the employee, not as potentially just mad as hell but as "distraught." The feminized term implied genteel handling. At Enron, intelligence was coded into a form of brutal shrewdness. People below the level of Baxter who maintained any sense of good practice apart from the bottom line were coded by the performance rating system as rather stupid and eased out. Of course, this coding, which was the norm at most growth companies, MEANT that people at all levels did what they were told. This is in spite of the fact that an old accounting principle happens to be one's ability to explain one's tax deductions or annual report to a neutral man-in-the-street. Enron's CPAs and network admins were, in addition to being employees, men in the street yet were expected to toe the mark. The result has been a recession now known to be double-dip (and the number and depths of the dips is not a known quantity.) The boom was fueled by a trust that was erased. This Humpty Dumpty will not, I am afraid to say, be brought back by exhortations to play nice in any system where the rewards for playing dirty exist and where ordinary people are terrorized by employment at will. When I was in school, ordinary students were proud to be accounting majors or even majors in data processing. Some of them actually felt that their hard work would welcome them into a demi-priesthood in which they could opt out of megasuccess in favor of a more sheltered life. They felt that their expertise was both technical and an adherence to standards. In accounting, this was the refusal to record income that wasn't received. In data processing this was, in the 1970s, a "stuctured programming" movement that declared that a rigourous approach to merely writing instructions to a computer was better because a truthful result occured. But as seen in this book and a recent series on Arthur Anderson in the Chicago Tribune, enthusiastic loyalty to internal professional standards was coded in the 1980s and 1990s as being a speed bump on the road to mega-profits. The result is that the in-crowd members cower in their trophy homes waiting for summons in the mail and the ordinary slob is looking for work in companies that cannot fund new hires. The country as a whole slides towards an unprecedented event in our history (a war of aggression) in preference to a serious moral inventory, which is instead recommended only to individual losers of the struggle. Some of us have a bad habit of wanting to be informed and the authors of this collection do us an excellent service.
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