Six years on, the downfall of Enron still reverberates. Important principals in the story are either in prison (Andrew Fastow, Jeff Skilling), dead (Ken Lay, Cliff Baxter), very rich (Lou Pai, Rebecca Mark), or somewhere between these states. The historic event that was Enron still makes for excellent reading, even for the layman. Whiz kids Skilling and Fastow employed business and accounting methods so complex than only an MBA from Harvard or Columbia could understand them. I am sure that this was their entire point… baffle them with bullshit.
To date, somewhere between 10 and 20 books have been penned about Enron since the company tanked in late 2001. These books can be broadly divided into micro- and macro-scopes. Books devoted to the nitty gritty business-related topics include Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind and Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kirk Eichenwald. These books are well researched and demand a bit of education on the part of the reader. While not impossible to understand, they require a bit of business wood shedding to understand what is going on.
The macro-scope books, which include Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron by Robert Bryce, offer a view from 30,000 feet of the rise and fall of Enron. Pipe Dreams is a downright social satire skewering the swaggering specter of greed and gluttony.
Add to Pipe Dreams, Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron by Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins. Swartz, like Pipe Dream’s Bryce, is a Houston-based journalist who wrote widely on Enron during its formative years. Watkins was the Enron vice president responsible for the now famous August 2001 memo to Ken Lay expressing concern for the health of Enron: “Has Enron become a risky place to work? For those of us who didn't get rich over the last few years, can we afford to stay?”
While Watkins had the title of Vice President, the reader must question its veracity due to the constant restructuring and reorganization typifying Enron’s human resources during the 1990s. She was definitely not part of the upper echelon executives bilking the company for millions. Robert Bryce, in Pipe Dreams, titled Chapter 40, “Sherron Watkins Saves Her own Ass” prompting this reader to wonder what illegal activities Ms. Watkins was involved in.
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1 - GL Hauptfleisch
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