He once gave a speech advising anyone who wanted to complete a power project to “get all the lawyers in one room, then shoot ’em – in the mouth, because it’s impossible to miss.

McKinsey partners tend to be designers of ditches, not diggers of ditches. When it comes to executing their lofty theories, well, consultants lean toward leaving those messy realities to the companies themselves.

The last and most painful irony is that the two longtime rival armies in the securitization market – the investment banks and the GSEs – would end up magnifying each other’s sins rather than keeping each other in check.

Never, ever do the easy wrong instead of the harder right.

The tale of Enron is a story of human weakness, of hubris and greed and rampant self-delusion; of ambition run amok; of a grand experiment in the deregulated world; of a business model that didn’t work; and of smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster – and who couldn’t admit they were wrong.

Small cap companies complain constantly that they are neglected. They have a very tough time getting Wall Street research analysts to follow them, to pay attention to them. There are small companies that will say that I have grown my earning at 20 percent over the last five years and no one will pay attention to me.

It was actually in retrospect a pretty meek story. It didn't say that the company is a fraud and going to go bankrupt in nine months. In fact, if you had said to me at the time that Enron is going to go under, I'd have said, 'Are you kidding?' It just didn't quite make sense. In retrospect I fault myself for not questioning it more than I did.

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.

So Merrill Lynch has launched its first campaign in years to advertise the accomplishments of its investment banking business. The ads feature things like Merrill's recapitalization of Sierra Pacific. I guess including "helping Enron achieve its earnings goals in 1999" might be a little awkward given that Merrill Lynch bankers are currently on trial in Houston for that "accomplishment."

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