Tesco
Enron
Book

Enron

The Rise and Fall

Loren Fox
Wiley, 2003

Read or listen offline

автоматическое преобразование текста в аудио
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×
автоматическое преобразование текста в аудио

Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Eye Opening
  • Background

Recommendation

Enron’s story seems to have happened all at once. There was a big company with a stock price shooting for the stars and, then, suddenly there was a massive fraud, and the two things came so close together it was like hearing the explosion from a fireworks display after you’ve seen the light in the sky. Loren Fox’s account was one of the first books about Enron and remains one of the best. The author is a skillful, diligent reporter who managed to get the story first and get it right, although Enron did not authorize his book or cooperate with him. His discussion of the company’s complex, illegal accounting maneuvers is thorough and, if not quite clear, certainly complete. The book was written during the relatively early stages of the legal proceedings against the architects of the Enron fraud, so a lot of the material uncovered by Justice Department and SEC investigators was not yet available. The demerit of this is that Fox was not able to include much that is now common knowledge about Enron. However, getAbstract.com finds that there is an advantage as well: Fox was not excessively guided or directed by common knowledge and conventional wisdom, but instead carved his own path through the thicket of Enron’s weird and instructive history.

Take-Aways

  • Ken Lay, a poor boy from rural Missouri, was one of the U.S.’s most respected, richest CEOs and entrepreneurs, until he became the center of a shameful scandal.
  • When Jeff Skilling was at Harvard, a professor asked what he would do if he were CEO of a company that made a product that killed customers.
  • Skilling replied that he would continue to make and sell the fatal product because his job would be to make money for shareholders, not look after the public’s health.

About the Author

Loren Fox is a former senior editor at Business 2.0, a former Dow Jones News Service reporter and editor, and former finance editor of Upside Magazine. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Salon.com and others.

Comment on this summary or Начать обсуждение