The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron

Other McKinsey partners began saying of Skilling, “Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt.”

“I knew that what I was doing was misleading,” Fastow told the Las Vegas crowd. “But I didn’t think it was illegal. I thought: That’s how the game is played. You have a complex set of rules, and the objective is to use the rules to your advantage.”

The larger message was that the wealth and power enjoyed by those at the top of the heap in corporate America demand no sense of broader responsibility. To accept those arguments is to embrace the notion that ethical behavior requires nothing more than avoiding the explicitly illegal, that refusing to see the bad things happening in front of you ma

For the analysts, there was a final reason they needed to keep their buy ratings on Enron: the ugliest and most powerful reason of all. There was simply too much investment-banking business at stake not to have a screaming buy on the stock. In an earlier age, Wall Street research and investment banking had been separated by a so-called Chinese Wall

no company can prosper over the long term if every employee is a free agent, motivated solely by greed, no matter how smart he is. No company can function if it only hires brilliant MBAs—and sets them against each other. There is a reason companies value team players, just as there’s a reason that people who get along with others tend to do well in

Thanks in part to those conflicts of interest and lack of competition that Senator Shelby had talked about, along with a good helping of old-fashioned greed, the credit rating agencies had assigned AAA ratings (even safer than Enron’s rating) to billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities that should have been labeled “junk.” If “tricking an

Concluding that the energy crisis was bound to mean big changes for the staid old pipeline industry, Lay decided the time was ripe to exit the government and head into the world of business. In September 1973, less than a year after he arrived at the Interior Department, Lay put out a feeler to W. J. (Jack) Bowen, CEO of a midsize pipeline company

If broadband’s promises and valuation were miles ahead of reality, well, they would ultimately catch up. As Enron people saw it, this was how they always did things. “Our company was running downhill, with our arms pinwheeling, as fast as we can,” says one former executive. “You get to a point where your legs can’t keep up with your body. But we al

The 1982 book In Search of Excellence, perhaps the best-selling management tome of all time, was written by two McKinsey partners.