Bethany McLean People Quotations

I think synergies are a lot like UFOs: Lots of people claim to have seen them, but few can actually prove they exist.

It doesn't really change anything. It's not like people will get their jobs back or their retirement savings back. But I do think the trial is important. It will set a precedent of what's acceptable corporate conduct. Is it OK for executives to do anything so long as it's technically legal?

Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

the powerful lesson from Enron for me is the power of self delusion and how people rationalise and deceive themselves. And I think when Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling say they are innocent now, as they do with their trial approaching in early 2006, they mean it on a certain level. One smart financial observer said to me that he's never met the CEO of a fraudulent company who didn't come to believe in what he'd created.

The story took on an importance later that it did not deserve originally. Whether I wrote that story or not, Enron would have gone bankrupt, investors would have lost billions of dollars and thousands of people would have lost their jobs. I just picked up on an underlying skepticism. If you had told me then that the company would go under by the end of the year, I would have never believed it. I was as naive as the rest of us.