Barry's Blog

Jeffrey Skilling, who was sentenced this past Monday to 25 years in prison for orchestrating the massive accounting fraud at Enron, is not your average white-collar criminal.  While most white-collar felons are motivated by greed, as in the cases of billion-dollar companies such as Adelphia and WorldCom, Skilling was a bit different.

Surely enough, Skilling had begun well. As one who graduated near the top of his class at Harvard Business School, his leadership in the early 1990's led to Enron's success due to his visionary idea that transformed the natural gas industry. Until he came along, Enron's primary business was buying, selling, and then transporting natural gas through its pipelines. But Skilling proposed the creation of a "gas bank," where Enron would serve as the market maker of futures contracts. The plan matched buyers of natural gas , who wanted to lock in current prices for future deliveries, with producers, who wanted a guarantee for customers down the road.

The gas bank would later become Enron Capital & Trade, which Skilling headed. And when he became president of Enron years later, he tried to reproduce the same success in other areas.  While Skilling insisted that these Enron units be portrayed as vibrant businesses, the executives who ran those units knew otherwise. 

Without question, Skilling earned tens of millions of dollars in salary and stock options between the time he joined Enron in 1990 and his sudden retirement in August, 2001. And at his sentencing, the U.S. District judge approved a settlement calling for Skilling to surrender $43 million in cash and assets to restitution funds representing former employees. But if Skilling seemed diffident about money, he did crave respect and the acknowledgment of his achievements. When defense attorney Dan Petrocelli showed the jury an energy magazine that listed Skilling among the most important figures of the energy business in the 20th century (alongside the listing for legendary oil titan John Rockefeller), as Petrocelli waved the magazine overhead, Skilling is reported to have blushed. According to evidence that emerged during his four-month trial in federal court earlier this year, Skilling's primary motivation in the fraud was not money, but that he was too proud to admit  that some of his business initiatives at Enron were failures. 

Pride blinds us from seeing things as they truly are. How does pride manifest itself in our lives? How does it cloud our perspective?  Are we willing to admit our mistakes, professional and personal? Might we be on a similar path?

"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves...There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility." 

-C.S. Lewis, "The Great Sin," in Mere Christianity 

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow