Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

Skilling’s sentence is engineered to sound like accountability while evacuating it. The opening question, tangled and backward-looking, frames everything as hindsight management: not what he did, but what he might have done if he’d known how it would play out for "my company". That possessive matters. Even after Enron’s collapse, the instinct is to center the institution (and, by extension, the executive) rather than the people who lost jobs, savings, and trust. The harm becomes an unfortunate plot twist in a corporate drama, not a moral reckoning.

Then comes the verbal stalling: "I think - I think..". The repetition reads like spontaneity, but it functions as a pressure-release valve, buying time and softening the edges of responsibility. It also performs humility without delivering specifics. No action is named, no choice is owned; the grammar stays abstract because abstraction is safer than detail.

The most revealing move is the pivot to the collective: "we all would... we would..". It’s a subtle laundering of agency. By universalizing regret, Skilling recasts his decisions as ordinary human fallibility rather than the product of deliberate risk-taking, accounting games, and a culture that treated reality as something you could out-negotiate. "A number of things" is the corporate equivalent of a shrug: it implies error while refusing the inventory that true contrition requires.

Placed in the public aftermath of Enron, the line isn’t meant to confess. It’s meant to sound reasonable enough to survive a microphone, a courtroom, and history’s replay button.