Product Description

“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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #447133 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-09
• Released on: 2004-03-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.com Review
Something strange happened to the Enron Corporation in the early 1990s: It went from a company that traded in tangible goods to one that dealt in pure abstractions, with shoddy accounting practices, astonishing compensation packages, and smoke and mirrors to obfuscate this new reality.

Company auditors, Sherron Watkins among them, warned top Enron execs from CEO Kenneth Lay on down that the company’s increasing reliance on cooked books and phony reports "will implode in a wave of accounting scandals." As anyone who played the stock market or watched Enron suits do the perp walk on the evening news a couple of years ago will remember, that’s exactly what happened. Texas Monthly editor Swarz and Watkins team up to offer this account, rich in anecdote and numbers alike, of what went wrong and who made it so. Though even-handed throughout, they serve up plenty of righteous scorn for the corporate leaders who enriched themselves as the company disintegrated, and for the name-brand politicians who abetted them.

Though Osama bin Laden’s pawns barely dented the U.S. economy, observes Alex Berenson in The Number, Lay and his lieutenants brought it to its knees. Swartz’s and Watkins’s eye-opening account will rekindle new indignation over unpunished crimes and well-rewarded hubris, and it ought to be required reading in business schools henceforth. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Although Watkins, the Enron executive who wrote the anonymous memo that blew the company's troubles wide open, is listed as this book's coauthor, the writing appears to be all Swartz. The Texas Monthly editor uses Watkins as an extensive source and treats her career at Enron as a major narrative thread, but her account of the energy company's financial misdealings casts a much wider net. The book offers particularly strong perspective on some of Enron's wilder escapades, like its disastrous foray into Internet broadcasting, and an unsettling body of evidence about Enron's possible manipulation of California's energy crisis. It does a stunning job of chronicling the power games within Enron. (Although he's not named as a source, it seems likely former CEO Jeff Skilling must have granted at least one interview off the record.) This version of Enron's history is as richly detailed as Robert Bryce's Pipe Dreams, but without that version's overtly moralizing tone; Swartz lets the facts speak for themselves. Watkins's input, interspersed throughout the story, offers a personal perspective on the cutthroat competition among the "hungry, restless, and tightly wound" Enron staffers, especially when she herself is at her most aggressive. The depiction of her gradual awareness that something was wrong, and her efforts to get her superiors to address the problem, helps make the financial crisis understandable on an emotional as well as an informational level, and provides an effective anchor to all the other sides of Enron Swartz includes.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Former Enron employee Watkins joins forces with Swartz, executive editor of Texas Monthly, to reveal just how power-hungry and hedonistic Enron's top brass really were.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Grain of salt
I am a former Enron employee. In spite of the way the press (and Jeff Skilling's "befuddled" play-acting in the Congressional hearings) portrays it, many of the issues which brought about the firm's demise were not particularly secret. Sherron Watkins acknowledges and/or implies she was aware of many aspects ("I sure hope we make good use of the bad news about Skilling's resignation and do some house cleaning - can we write down some problem assets and unwind raptor? I've been horribly uncomfortable about some of our accounting in the past few years and with the number of 'redeployments' up, I'm concerned some disgruntled employee will tattle." - Watkins E-Mail to Rick Buy, from FERC).

What Watkins really fails to answer in her book is why she waited so long to "blow the whistle" and why there seemed to be no other "whistleblowers." While many people all over the company were aware of the off balance sheet vehicles there seemed to be a cult of denial that either they were a problem or that they showed any signs of impropriety.

In fact, some of the documents, meetings, and conversations Sherron Watkins references as well as some documents turned in for the Congressional hearings show that there were concerns with Raptor, for instance, well over a year before bankruptcy, bubbled up to the Chief Risk Officer, Chief Accounting Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. Watkins perhaps deserves credit for being the first to bring the problems to the level of CEO, but she was the last in a long series of attempts by many individuals, most of whom took greater career risks by criticizing at a time that the firm was still considered "healthy."

Watkins makes her motivations unclear, which is one of the more disturbing aspects of the book - whether she is simply another example of an "Enron-cultured" individual who seizes upon opportunities rather than embracing the spirit of the touted Enron "core values" - Respect, Integrity, Communication, and Excellence.

Power Failure: Successful book
I loved this book. I tried diligently to follow this story as it unfolded in real time in the newspapers. As someone not in the finance industry, I knew it was important but found it near-nigh impossible to understand what had gone wrong and how. In this book, Mimi Swartz provides an insider's look (thanks to Sherron Watkins and many other Enron folk) while still maintaining equipoise. The complex financial instruments that were at the heart of this disaster are explained simply and elegantly. I also learned that, like the Milken/junk bond fiasco, the Enron disaster started with fundamentally important business innovation that is likely to remain with us. Bottom line: I couldn't put it down.

A whistle-blower tells the fascinating story of Enron
Imagine the life of Sherron Watkins: a posh job with one of the most successful energy companies in the world, all of the amenities that come with wining-and-dining important contacts while negotiating deals worth millions --- and a nagging suspicion that something within the company you're working for isn't quite right. There were thousands of Enron employees, all with the same upward mobility and satisfying salaries that Sherron Watkins possessed. So what set Watkins apart from them? It was the fact that she was willing to risk sacrificing it all to expose the corrupt practices that had made Enron so profitable.

In POWER FAILURE, the entire history of Enron is explored, from its inception in 1985 to its demise in 2001. Written by Mimi Swartz with assistance from whistle-blower Sherron Watkins, this book will take the reader on a journey that includes Enron's earliest successes and failures, the super-charged management conferences, the politically incorrect Enron trading floors and the Senate Hearing Room's investigation and subsequent trial.

But POWER FAILURE is much more than just an expose on a corrupt corporation. It also provides a frightening view on what the big-business atmosphere has become. The story of Enron shows how delicate the balance of politics, money and business practices is, and how thin the line between legal and illegal can be.

Swartz and Watkins effectively tell the story of Enron without a hint of tabloid exploitation. And with all the exploitations that occurred within Enron, that's nothing short of a miracle. They give an accurate, honest perspective on all of the events that took place in the history of the corporation and portray the characters of Enron without bias. That's not to say that there's no negative statements made about people throughout the book --- just that they're given in a diplomatic manner. The book is written in an informative yet entertaining manner, complete with entertaining sidebars and humorous anecdotes to keep the reader's attention. And they have included plenty of pictures to point out just who the evildoers are. This is a must read for business people, tax evaders, anyone who plans to cheat the system, or the average Joe who wants to know what really happened at Enron.

--- Reviewed by Melissa Brown