FOREWORD

In February 2001, as the editorial director of Fortune magazine, I helped edit a short, rigorous story—just four pages long—by a young writer named Bethany McLean, who had joined the magazine some six years earlier from Goldman Sachs and quickly become one of Fortune’s brightest stars. Her story was entitled, simply, “Is Enron Overpriced?”

At its core, Bethany’s article asked one very straightforward question: How does Enron make its money? For years the company had been a Wall Street darling, its stock moving steadily upward with each new quarter’s rising profits. It was seen as the paradigmatic example of a company that had transformed itself from an old-economy stalwart—operating pipelines that moved natural gas—to a new-economy marvel, creating dazzling efficiencies and hedging risks (like the weather!) that no one had ever thought to hedge before. Just a month before Bethany’s story ran, Businessweek had put Enron’s chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, on its cover, posing with what appeared to be harnessed electricity in his hand, with the cover line “Power Broker.”

But Bethany had been poring through Enron’s financial documents, and what she realized was not just that they were complicated (most big companies have complicated financials) but that they were incomprehensible, even indecipherable. She started calling around to the Wall Street analysts who were so bullish on Enron, asking her simple question.

Some of them told her that Enron was a company you just had to trust. One analyst admitted to her that the company’s earnings were “a black box.” When she reached Skilling himself, the Enron CEO first complained that she “didn’t get it,” something he often said to people who questioned Enron. Then he hung up the phone on her. The Enron public-relations department insisted that if she would just come to Houston and visit the company’s headquarters, the fog would soon lift. But with our deadline fast approaching, the Enron PR department decided that if Mohammed wouldn’t come to the mountain, they would have to visit Fortune . The company sent a small contingent to New York to meet with Bethany and her editors, including me. Andy Fastow, the company’s chief financial officer, led the Enron team.

It would later be blindingly obvious that Fastow had not told us the truth—how could he, given that much of Enron’s earnings were the result of accounting manipulations that created the illusion of profitability? But even in the moment it was clear that Fastow’s goal was pretty much the same as those financials Bethany had been poring through: to obfuscate and confuse. I can’t remember all the details, but I vividly recall Bethany asking sharp, pointed questions about the company’s business model and Fastow responding with lengthy, nearly unintelligible answers about how Enron was like Toyota, how it should be thought of as a logistics company, etc., etc.—even though Enron’s main business wasn’t actually moving anything from place to place, but rather trading.

And then something happened that Bethany and I would never forget. As the meeting was drawing to a close and the Enron executives were putting on their coats, Fastow turned to Bethany and said, “I don’t care what you say about Enron. Just don’t make me look bad.”

It was such a jarring thing for him to say on the eve of what was clearly going to be an unflattering article about his company. In retrospect, it was a tip-off—to the mentality of the people running Enron and to the fact that there was indeed something fishy about those financial statements—Fastow was, after all, Enron’s CFO. It was a real signal that Bethany—whose story wound up raising all the right questions, even if she didn’t yet have all the answers—was on to something.

Some articles drop like bombshells. Bethany’s wasn’t like that. Instead, it slowly seeped into the consciousness of Wall Street. Enron’s stock had been in the 70s when Bethany’s story was published, not far from its all-time high. Ever so steadily, it began to sink. In April, Skilling was questioned on a conference call by an investor who asked his own tough questions. “Asshole,” Skilling muttered under his breath. In August, Skilling suddenly and unexpectedly quit as chief executive—a move that was all the more stunning because he had taken over as CEO just six months earlier from Enron founder Ken Lay. Though Skilling had effectively been running the company for years, everyone knew how much he had wanted the actual title of chief executive. His resignation triggered a flurry of skeptical stories and questions.

And then came October. With the stock having fallen into the high 30s—and Lay, back as CEO, trying to persuade a now-skeptical Wall Street that everything was fine—the Wall Street Journal revealed that Fastow had made tens of millions on the side running a pair of limited partnerships that had done business with Enron. That story helped accelerate the feeding frenzy that was already developing, both in the press and on Wall Street, around Enron. By November, Fastow was gone, sacrificed by Lay as he desperately tried to keep Enron afloat. But like any company that trades for a living—just like Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns seven years later—once Enron had lost the confidence of its trading partners, it was toast. On December 2, 2001, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Even then, though, nobody knew the full story of what had brought down Enron. Fastow’s LJM partnerships got the immediate blame—both inside and outside of Enron—but one of the main points of The Smartest Guys in the Room is that Fastow wasn’t actually the one who brought down Enron. His chicanery—which he’d later testify was approved by Skilling—was actually what was propping up Enron. The real story was that Enron’s businesses weren’t making much money, and that much of their profits were phony. The whole point of Fastow’s dealings, from Enron’s point of view, was to make it appear that the company was a profit machine that it clearly wasn’t. (And if Fastow skimmed a little on the side, well, what can you do?) Enron’s aura had been such that nobody had ever bothered looking into the internal strife, the macho posing, the rampant greed—and the dysfunction in the company’s executive suite, starting with the out-to-lunch Lay and the emotionally unstable Skilling.

Right after Enron filed for bankruptcy, Bethany wrote a terrific cover story about the company’s decline and fall in which she touched on some of these larger themes. In editing the article I realized how well-sourced she was, but I could also clearly see that there was a much bigger, more important story here than simply a crooked CFO who was lining his pockets. Her story made it obvious that the rise and fall of Enron would make a terrific book.

So I went to my bosses and suggested that we— Fortune magazine—take advantage of Bethany’s Enron reporting and write a book about what had happened. Because there was so much to unravel, I suggested she team up with Peter Elkind, a Texas-based Fortune writer who had written a series of fabulous investigative sagas for the magazine. Happily, everyone agreed. In 2003, Portfolio published the first edition of The Smartest Guys in the Room . I am biased, of course, but I contend that it remains the single most authoritative account of this landmark event.

It is far more than that, though. The Smartest Guys in the Room is an almost anthropological examination of the nature of corporate scandal. Why do values go awry? What happens when the wrong person gets a big job? Why is it so tempting to post false profits instead of telling the truth? How distorting is the prospect of stock market riches?

In the immediate aftermath of Enron, there were at least a half-dozen other big corporate blowups: WorldCom turned out to be cooking its books, and CEO Bernie Ebbers went to jail. Tyco became embroiled in scandal, and its chief, Dennis Kozlowski, also went to prison. But none of these disasters have resonated like Enron. At many business schools, studying Enron is part of the curriculum. Just recently, Andy Fastow, who was released from prison in 2011, gave an unpaid speech in Las Vegas at a conference of fraud examiners. He drew a full-house crowd of 2,500 people. Afterward, some of the fraud examiners and convention staffers asked to have their pictures taken with him. Explained one: “He’s part of history.”

Enron remains the defining scandal of the 21st century. None of those other scandals had the staying power—or the canary-in-the-coal-mine quality—of Enron. This was partly because no other modern-day company, prior to the financial crisis of 2008, had Enron’s vaunted reputation. But it is also because almost everything we later found out about how Enron operated was a harbinger of scandals yet to come. Off-balance-sheet vehicles. Banks doing things they shouldn’t to generate fees. Ratings agencies giving safe ratings to investments that were clearly doomed to fail. Corporate executives using every means possible to maximize short-term revenues—and boost their own multimillion-dollar bonuses—even when those means were, at best, unethical.

Congress held hearings in the wake of the Enron bankruptcy; it even passed a law, Sarbanes-Oxley, that was intended to prevent future scandals. (Among other provisions, the law calls for the CEO and CFO of a publicly traded company to sign a document attesting to the validity of its numbers. Despite numerous instances of post-Enron fraud, the power of that document has never been tested in court.) Newspapers and magazines wrote dozens of articles about how to prevent future Enrons. Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay were tried and given lengthy sentences (Lay, of course, died of a heart attack before he ever spent a day in jail). And then we all moved on.

No one can say for sure whether a more rigorous Washington response to Enron might have prevented the financial crisis of 2008. But I tend to think so. Both Enron and the financial crisis were the products of the same deregulatory impulse that seized Washington in the 1990s. Enron had exposed the deep, systemic flaws of the ratings agencies. The off-balance-sheet vehicles Enron used were the same kind of vehicles banks used to hold their collateralized debt obligations—the so-called toxic assets that did so much damage to the financial system when they collapsed. And they existed for the same reason: to hide debt.

On one level, the Enron scandal, as told in the pages that follow, is simply a great, rollicking tale. When Bethany and Peter set out to write The Smartest Guys in the Room , telling that story is all they were really trying to do. But it is impossible to read this book today, a decade after it was first published, and not wonder what might have been—if everyone had been willing to pay just a little more attention.

Joe Nocera
July 2013
Op-Ed columnist
The New York Times