In a different year, I never would have finished this book.

I have a long sordid history of not finishing books. It's not uncommon for me to start and stop reading 9 or 10 books over several months before something finally clicks and I finish a book. Even during my more prolific reading years in my teens and early 20's, I still suffered from a sort of literary ADD that made me put down a lot of books after only 20 or so pages.

Well, maybe I've turned a corner of some sort because last night I finished The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, one of the slowest reads I have ever experienced.

I know very little about management, investment and corporations. I know even less about accounting. For this reason, The Smartest Guys in the Room was a very difficult book to read. But that shouldn't detract from the book's quality at all. Indeed, it is a high compliment. This is a remarkably written and researched book that actually managed to get me to understand quite a bit of what happened at Enron.

The events that transpired at Enron were far more the result of incompetence than malice. Sure, the finance people were plenty malicious, but had higher ups like Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling had the slightest interest in running a company's day to day operations, the financial shenanigans would never have have gotten off the ground. Skilling, meanwhile, made ridiculous promises to investors about Enron's growth and earnings that all but required the accountants to lie at every turn. In truth, the only people at Enron who seemed to be halfway good at what they were doing were the ones intentionally breaking the law (most notably CFO Andy Fastow). And there actually weren't that many of them. Everyone else was just willfully blind or painfully stupid. (Skilling does, however, deserve a substantial amount of blame for moving Enron from a stable asset-based company to an illusory one built on high-risk energy trading and dealmaking.)

Highly recommended.

52B/52W Progress: 8 down, 44 to go.

Currently Reading: TBD