Resisting Corporate Corruption, 3rd Edition

A Note on Sources

Since this is neither a work of Enron’s corporate history nor a chronicle of the financial crisis, its focus has not been a comprehensive investigation of those events. Those stories have been told several times already.

Rather, the focus was to identify critical moments in the evolution of Enron and major financial firms when their respective ethical cultures were “on the line.” From there, the endeavor was to construct representative case studies depicting those moments and the choices faced by key individuals. Sources were thus selected and used for this purpose. What follows is a description of these specific sources used for the Enron and financial crisis cases.

The Enron Cases

Three comprehensive accounts of the Enron story provided most of the material from which these cases were constructed:

1. Mimi Swartz with Sherron Watkins, Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, New York: Doubleday, 2003.
2. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, New York: Penguin, 2003.
3. Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, New York: Random House, 2005.

The last two works are built upon the one(s) before, telling the same story but with progressively more detail and data. With minor exceptions, they agree on the stories told in these case studies. The Author’s Notes provide comments clarifying where one or another provided unique information or detail. Conspiracy of Fools, coming ...