Enron. The word has become synonymous with excess, avarice, and Wall Street skullduggery. It wasn't always so. Once upon a time, Enron was a stable, profitable company with some of the best energy assets in the world. But in the late 1990s, the company changed.
Surely you've heard about some of Enron's convoluted deals and nefarious accounting practices. But what hasn't been explained is Why? Why did this once-thriving, innovative company with rock-solid cash flow suddenly implode? The answer, Texas business journalist Robert Bryce reveals in this book, is that bad business practices begin with human beings.
Pipe Dreams is not your typical boring business book. It's a gossipy, funny, irreverent analysis of Why Enron Failed. It traces Enron's transformation from a small regional gas pipeline company into an energy Goliath...and then tracks step-by-step, business decision by business decision, extra-marital affair by extra-marital affair, how Enron's leaders were corrupted. Based on interviews with more than 200 current and former Enron employees, as well as Wall Street analysts and dozens of company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pipe Dreams tells the inside story of the greed, sex, and excess that strangled the seventh-largest corporation in America. It contains profiles of the company's key miscreants, including Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andrew Fastow, and Lou Pai, the secretive trading whiz who sold more stock - $270 million worth - than any Enron executive. There's also a devastating profile of Rebecca Mark, a largely-ignored player in the Enron saga, whose bad deals in India and the water business cost investors $2 billion.