Blake P. Sallé, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Emerging Technologies at Cisco Systems recommends the book that he believes is the best book about leadership that he has ever read: Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind.
"I, personally, think that the best leadership book that I have ever read is "The Smartest Guy in the Room". This book is the story of Enron. The reason why this book is the best book I've ever read about leadership is, it talks about what occurs when you are innovative and Enron was incredibly innovative. They were a big client of mine. They were the most innovative company, they absolutely changed trading. Now, what happened was in the absence of ethics and integrity they went well beyond and completely destroyed their company. In that book it illustrates the steps that were taken of where people put ethics and integrity aside and had such an innovative machine that just completely crumpled."
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Until the spring of 2001, the Houston energy giant Enron epitomized the triumph of the new economy. Feared by rivals, worshiped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every quarter; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries.
Then a young Fortune writer named Bethany McLean wrote an article posing a simple question - How, exactly, does Enron make its money? - and the company's house of cards began to collapse. Though other business scandals would follow, none has had the shattering effect of Enron's bankruptcy, which caused Americans to lose faith in a system that rewarded top insiders with millions of dollars while small investors, including many Enron employees, lost everything.
Despite enormous media coverage of Enron, the definite story of its astonishing rise and fall comes alive for the first time in this gripping narrative by McLean and her Fortune colleague Peter Elkind. Drawing on a wide range of private documents and well-placed sources, many of them exclusive, McLean and Elkind lead you behind closed doors and deep into Enron's past, to pierce the veil of secrecy that has surrounded the company's inner workings and corrupt culture.
The Smartest Guys in the Room is fundamentally a human drama - of people drunk on their own success, people so ambitious, so certain of their own brilliance, so fueled by greed and hubris that they believed they could fool the world.
Until the spring of 2001, the Houston energy giant Enron epitomized the triumph of the new economy. Feared by rivals, worshiped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every quarter; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries. 
