""They're still trying to hide the weenie," thought Sherron Watkins
as she read a newspaper clipping about Enron two weeks before
Christmas, 2001. . . It quoted CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the
company's creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment.
"Don't assume that there is a smoking gun."
Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in
extreme spin mode...
Power Failure" is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the
collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as
the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had
aspired to be "The World's Leading Company," and had briefly been
the seventh largest corporation in America.
Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially
based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron
vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other
interviews, "Power Failure" shows the human face beyond the greed,
arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company's meteoric rise
in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay's and
Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and
Enron's money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush's
election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron's
praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere,
the company's leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory
profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into
buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment
vehicles. The story of Enron's fall is a morality tale writ large,
performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side
plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to
hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums.
Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins
observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider's perspective are:
CEO Ken Lay, Enron's "outside face," who was more interested in
playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in
managing Enron's high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff
Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron's mercenary trading culture,
who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the
personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and
seductive head of Enron's international division, who was
Skilling's sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow,
whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far
more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron's deal-making,
trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron's finance
department into a "profit center," creating a honeycomb of
financial entities to bolster Enron's "profits," while diverting
tens of millions of dollars into his own pockets
An unprecedented chronicle of Enron's shocking collapse, "Power
Failure" should take its place alongside the classics of previous
decades - "Barbarians at the Gate" and "Liar's Poker" - as one of
the cautionary tales of our times.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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