Following on this earlier profile, the Chronicle’s Mike Tolson provides this extensive profile today of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling as he gears up for the commencement of the Super Bowl of Enron criminal trials next Monday.
Echoing thoughts that have long been presented on this blog, Skilling in the article talks about the difficulty of defending himself in an intensely anti-Enron environment:
Skilling, as ever, insists Enron was a great, innovative company that did not deserve the fate that befell it.
“It was a complicated business, and the fact that it was complicated led to misrepresentations and a lot of what I call the urban myth of Enron,” [Skilling] said.
Rather than gather enough information to understand it, he said, people accept popular notions that it was a house of cards, perpetuated by fraud, and that Skilling was a master manipulator of impressionable young MBAs and a supersmart bamboozler who persuaded investors to buy overpriced stock so he could keep raking in fortunes in stock options.
“The way I have been portrayed is a caricature,” he said. “I don’t care what book or movie or article you are talking about, the caricature has been created and the real person kind of loses out in the process.”
Then, Skilling asks a very common sense question:
“If I were who I have been made out to be, could I have built a company? Who would have followed such a guy that has been portrayed like that?”
“Could I have built a company?” This statement alone is telling of who Jeff Skilling is. As if HE built the company. Ask Rich Kinder about what Rich created and what Skilling created. Ask the people who worked at Enron whether they, collectively, built Enron or whether Jeff Skilling, individually, built the company. Jeff Skilling is delusional. In his mind, he probably believes all the success of Enron accrues directly to him and, therefore, all that he was able to take from the company was rightfully his. After all, Skilling alone built the company. Or so his story goes.
Charles, most of Enron’s explosive growth occured under Skilling, not Kinder, who left in 1996.
I suppose I’m a bit more jaded about Mr. Skilling than some. He “built the Company” and ascended to it’s Presidency, only to quit a few months later for “family reasons?” I just can’t buy that.
And now, a featured article about how Mr. Skilling designed and built his attorney’s offices. How down-home boy-next-door.
I think Mr. Skilling is doing a masterful job, along with his PR Firm, of planting favorable stories to cast him in a more favorable light before his trial.
In any case, the trial will be very interesting!
“If I were who I have been made out to be, could I have built a company? Who would have followed such a guy that has been portrayed like that?”
Please. Lots of total bastards have built successful companies – Henry Ford springs to mind, for one. This is like asking if someone who looks like a nice, well-dressed person could possibly be a thief/murderer/whatever. It’s irrelevant.
Charles, even if one assumes that Skilling is a bastard, that does not mean that he is a criminal. Skilling’s point is that it is highly unlikely that a criminal could fool so many people into following him as a leader of a large company such as Enron.
even if one assumes that Skilling is a bastard, that does not mean that he is a criminal.
The point that just keeps getting missed… 🙂