How??

How could a person go from being a rural pastor's kid -- to the top of the corporate world -- to convicted felon?

Bryan Gruley and Rebecca Smith have some suggestions in this 2002 article from The Wall Street Journal. They omit the fact that Ken Lay is the son of a Baptist Pastor -- but make some interesting observations:


To the many people who know and admire Kenneth Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of Enron Corp., he's a brilliant, hard-working, decent, God-fearing man who couldn't possibly have been responsible for one of the biggest corporate collapses in history.

To some of the same people, he's also an ambitious man who grew so enamored of the trappings of his extraordinary success that he neglected their source, Enron, and blithely allowed his trusted lieutenants to plunge the company into a mire of deception and possible fraud.

It's the enigma central to the collapse of Enron. The same attributes that underpinned Mr. Lay's success -- tireless ambition, stubborn optimism and sometimes easy trust -- helped bring about his downfall.