Corporate-finance

Coke works at Hazelwood closing chapter on demise on steel in entire region. Read also: Homestead, with new forward by author, best one-town summary

I read this years ago, and I thought it was an excellent analysis of the collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, filled with compelling tales of individual people.

The books feels like a Greek tragedy, in which the protagonists are doomed to a slow slide towards the edge of a cliff. Institutionalized conflict overcomes the efforts of people from both labor and maangement to halt, or at least slow the inevitable slide.

For people who think that the current dot.com crash is a serious downturn, this book offers a very good counter-perspective. When an area loses 100K jobs in 10 years, and whole towns essentially close, that's a *real* downturn.

On the other hand, there's always hope. Pittsburgh has bounced back, and has a much more diversified economy. The last time I visited, I could see the sky, which was more difficult in the steel days. To grasp those days, either see the early Tom Cruise movie "All The Right Moves", or for depth, read this book.

This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn about what went wrong in this basic industry. Not only a study of the collapse of the steel industry in the Mon Valley, the book is also a study of the pain of postindustrialization that swept the country in the 1980's. Esentially, the author is writing about a national trend, but focuses on the Pittsburgh area, which is really a microcosm. It is also a good look at what happens when unions and management can't get their acts together.

I listened to the unabridged version on audio CD. This was really interesting. This is the first-hand account of a lower level professional at Enron who worked there for about 8 months before the bankruptcy and scandal erupted. This was not a real "insider" as far as the people he dealt with and what he did there. It's still interesting as far as learning how the day-to-day worked at Enron for the "normal" employee. You get peeks into the hiring process, training, how quarterly evaluations were handled, basically a bird's eye view of the typical joe at Enron. The rest is his recount of basically what's in public records, appeared in newstories, and a few things about what higher-up revealed to him about Enron. I really knew little about Enron before reading this, so I didn't mind that probably 60-70% of this was recanting media stories. For someone with good knowledge of the key players and issues, this probably will not hold your interest. If you want to know what the average guy at Enron observed and how Enron operated from his view, this is very good and funny.

The title is a real misnomer. The author witnessed no greed first-hand at Enron, but pontificates on greed based on the news stories, etc., that any of us could in any event. Coming from someone who while not appearing greedy, but pretty close, selling Enron items on E-Bay that he took with him, he wasn't necessarily the best person to discuss greed. Rationalizing that Enron owed him falls a little short.

A good insider's view from the ranks.

Brian Cruver was an expendable middle manager in one of Enron's flimsy business ventures, and got laid off when the company went into its infamous bankruptcy. So in this book we get an antidote to the far more common news accounts of Enron that have focused on the plight of ripped-off stockholders or the criminal actions of the executives. In this very readable and unexpectedly funny book, Cruver describes the collapse of the company from the point of view of hapless employees who only knew a little about what was going on, but couldn't do anything about it as they were too far away from the real power. We also get great insights into the plight of the thousands of laid off employees who had to comprehend the debacle they had witnessed, and try to shake off their reputation as former "Enronians."

As a sort-of insider, Cruver has unique insights into the bizarre Enron corporate culture that demanded profits at the expense of ethics or even common sense. Cruver theorizes that the root of this evil was the company's ridiculous peer-review process, in which getting a favorable rating meant keeping your job, and the rating was tied to your generation of profits above all else. Thus every single employee was under immense pressure to inflate profit reports, ignore bad news, and crush all their co-workers. This went all the way to the top, as executives went to the extremes of unethical behavior to increase "shareholder" value. Executives also saw the whole company as a way to enrich themselves, through shady business ventures, partnerships with non-existent companies and entities, and a brazen disregard for accounting rules. Thus we have a group of greedy and power-hungry execs who forgot that they were running a real business with employees, customers, and vendors as they gluttonized themselves.

Cruver does a great job describing the basics of Enron's disastrous accounting shenanigans, that made the company artificially prosperous before collapsing like a house of cards, without losing the reader in technical jargon. He also aptly describes the intense hatred that employees developed for execs like Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow, who all got extremely wealthy by essentially stealing from the public market and shafting their employees. Cruver has relieved his unemployment with this highly readable book that provides many keen insights, with a dryly sarcastic humor, into the Enron disaster that you probably won't find elsewhere. I understand that a movie will now be made from this book. Looks like Cruver has himself a fresh new career.

Loved this book - most of all just couldn't put it down. Cruver worked at Enron, so his stories and his experiences are different from any journalist; although Cruver also reports on the story with unexpected humor. The characters are real, and I could not help turning page after page waiting to see what happens to each of them (read the book in two days!) - even though we may THINK we know how the story ends. This was also the first book, and while other reviewers say Cruver borrowed from news stories they forgot to notice that he wrote this book BEFORE those stories came out. Others question the fact that Cruver was forced to disguise names for legal reasons. Nonsense. Every story I've ever read on the subject of Enron has at least one "anonymous source" so Cruver takes you a step further and pushes the envelope on identifiying these not-so-innocent people. This is simply a great book that will be remembered as the Enron book most entertaining, most interesting, and most well-written. I hope he writes more books, and I can't wait to see the movie version of this one (CBS "The Crooked E").