Rating

★★★★☆

Category

non-fiction

Read

2025-01-31

Pages

480

An account of the rise and fall of Enron. Good cautionary tale, though unfortunately most of the lesson is: don’t be greedy, don’t be an asshole.

Skilling also had a tendency to oversimplify, and he largely disregarded—indeed, he had an active distaste for—the messy details involved in executing a plan. What thrilled Skilling, always, was the intellectual purity of an idea, not the translation of that idea into reality. “Jeff Skilling is a designer of ditches, not a digger of ditches,” an Enron executive said years later. He was often too slow—even unwilling—to recognize when the reality didn’t match the theory.

The pure meritocracy Skilling thought he was installing was, in fact, a deeply dysfunctional workplace. That was hard to see in the early days, when the place felt vibrant and heady and exciting and they all were working so hard that they didn’t have time for anything else.

Here’s how another former employee describes the process: “Say you have a dog, but you need to create a duck on the financial statements. Fortunately, there are specific accounting rules for what constitutes a duck: yellow feet, white covering, orange beak. So you take the dog and paint its feet yellow and its fur white and you paste an orange plastic beak on its nose, and then you say to your accountants, ‘This is a duck! Don’t you agree that it’s a duck?’ And the accountants say, ‘Yes, according to the rules, this is a duck.’ Everybody knows that it’s a dog, not a duck, but that doesn’t matter, because you’ve met the rules for calling it a duck.”

By then, Enron had generated 3,000 separate corporate entities, more than 800 of them in offshore jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands. Enron’s corporate tax return for 2000 ran to 13 volumes.