Power Failure

The Inside Story of The Collapse of Enron

By: Mimi Swartz, Sherron Watkins

Narrated by: Karen White

“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.©2003 MiMi Swartz; (P)2003 Books on Tape, Inc.

Critic reviews

“A lucid account of the Enron debacle that may be the best informed and best written to date.” —Andrew Hill, Financial Times

“A compelling history of Enron . . . offering a savvy interpretation of its subject.” —Washington Post Book World

“Paints the most detailed portrait yet of the company’s ambitious executives and toxic culture.” —Business Week

“Colorful, movie-treatment narrative style” —Entertainment Weekly


“The book most Enron watchers have been waiting for.” —New York Daily News

“Reads like Tom Wolfe himself.” —Daily Telegraph

A worthwhile addition to my Enron library

This is maybe the sixth book I have read on Enron. Full disclosure: I am an aficionado, fan and amateur scholar of the Enron story. This one (for readers who already have a basic grasp of the narrative) has its own useful and illuminating angles and facts, large and small. Sherron Watkins' personalized journey through the company helps show the nervous, semi-entrepreneurial kind of path many felt they must follow, to be linked to the personalities and the "action" where advancement and even survival could be found. On occasion, the personal trivia veered into the stupid -- ski and paintball encounters and such. But I guess this shows some of the silly juvenile trash that I am given to understand still permeates the halls of many corporations, as team- and spirit- building exercises. Apparently the cheerleaders still stalk the halls of business. But these sidetracks are mercifully short, and the discussion often touches (if simplified, then comprehensibly) on quite substantive matters -- some details of accounting devices used to puff up revenues and hide debt, and the legalities of entering, say, retail electricity sales in multiple states. Then, too, we get a good portrait of the principals' (Skilling's and Fastow's, particularly) reactions to such obstacles, as mere technicalities to be creatively overcome. And there, the story is quite current, in view of globalized corporations' armies of numbers and law personnel brainstorming to "arbitrage" every such obstacle. Some of this is a natural (and not necessarily always nefarious) part of doing business -- creativity IS often about stretching existing boundaries and obstacles. And sometimes the legalities ARE sketchy. Of course, Enron became a caricature and a cartoon of this, as is skillfully laid out here. The narration is clear, punchy and quite suitable.

Power Failure

Incredible well written,well researched and well read story.
It is shocking and at the same time incredibly interesting to go into depth in this true story which left so many without retirement due to few extremely greedy ignorant persons,like Ken Lay and wife,shopping so much in Franch, that most of the staff flying on ,,one of the ,, Enrons privat jet,had to take commercial airliner back home.(What a shame).

Fascinating story

The story was fascinating, and as always with things Mimi Swartz does it was a story well told. The narrator was mostly okay but her pronunciation of some words was so jarring it was detrimental to the story. She pronounced Conoco wrong as well as Koch and multiple other words. It was very distracting.

A window into Corporate America

I really enjoyed this look into one of the biggest scandals of big business. While you may think a book about accounting rules would be quite dry it is anything but. The author does a great job of making the book interesting by making the core of the book a tale of the culture and personalities. Even the explanation of the accounting manipulations Enron cooked up were easily understood by the time you finished because they were explained in many different ways as the story transpires. It is pretty clear that while not all companies engage in such practices; the ethical lines are probably very blurred in many corporations today. Makes you look at the latest investigations like Fannie Mae with a new eye. Also recommend When Genius Failed. Similar enjoyable learning experience of investing within the context of a greed scandal story.

Unless you are really really hooked on Enron...

This was my third-in-a-row Enron book, so maybe I was just over it by then, but although it was an interesting perspective, it didn't add much to either Conspiracy of Fools, in my opinion the best, or The Smartest Guys in the Room, which did make some of the financial dealings a little easier to understand. It took me until the second section to get resigned to the narrator - it made sense to have a female narrator and maybe she actually sounded like Sherren - but she was definitely trying (way too hard) to emphasize things that were really not that exciting and did nothing to add to the story. Stick with stopping at two unless...