There are sure to be many accounts of Enron's collapse, but Bryce's gossipy version will be hard to beat for sheer...
An Austin-based reporter delivers the behind-the-scenes story of Enron’s rise and fall.
As astonishing as the damage done by Enron to the American economy is the impunity with which the company operated when it was riding high in the go-go 1990s. Bryce, who understands the flamboyance built into Texas business culture, clarifies Enron’s muddled and deceptive accounting practices, deconstructs the bone-headed and perpetually hyped ventures (Enron as water giant! Enron as broadband marketeer!) while lacing his account with the sexual foibles that played a tacit part in creating the company’s anything-goes executive culture. Ken Lay set the tone by having a semi-public affair with his secretary while married to his first wife, whom Lay eventually divorced to marry the secretary. Other good-time guys at Enron included Rich Kinder, president of the company until 1996, ousted partly because Lay found out about Kinder's affair with Lay's executive assistant; Ken Rice, head of Enron's broadband division (though he knew nothing, and cared to know nothing, about broadband), who conducted public groping matches with his light of love; and Lou Pai, head of Enron Energy Services, whose taste for striptease joints was put on the company bill. Kinder's successor, the infamous Jeff Skillings, emerges in Bryce's account as the ultimate in CEO arrogance. Skillings was responsible for the two linked factors that did Enron in: accounting shenanigans and out-of-control costs. The off-the-records partnerships designed by CFO Andy Fastow hid Enron's mounting cash crisis and thus made sensible cost-control measures unlikely, especially given the executive team’s taste for sybaritic pleasures. Skillings created a system that rewarded revenue generation with huge bonuses, regardless of the earnings derived from the revenue-generating ventures. Enron's dealers and managers had no incentive to cut costs and could be rewarded generously for flops.
There are sure to be many accounts of Enron's collapse, but Bryce's gossipy version will be hard to beat for sheer readability.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58648-138-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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