Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

Progress is a slippery word when it comes from Jeffrey Skilling, because he’s talking like a technocrat about what was, in reality, a moral and financial crime scene. “I think we had made some tremendous progress in the six months before I left” is corporate diction doing what it does best: sanding down jagged facts into a smooth narrative of competence. “Tremendous” is the tell. It’s boosterish, vague, and impossible to falsify without dragging the conversation back into specifics - specifics that, for Skilling, were legally radioactive.

The timing matters. Skilling resigned as Enron’s CEO in August 2001, months before the company collapsed and before the full scale of the accounting fraud became public. In that narrow window, “progress” can mean anything that buys time: soothing analysts, maintaining stock price, keeping lenders calm, preventing employee flight, tightening internal messaging. The phrase “before I left” functions like a moral airlock. It partitions his tenure into a supposedly productive era, implying whatever came after was someone else’s mess, or at least someone else’s failure to manage it.

Subtext: I was steering the ship responsibly; the storm is coincidental. That’s not just self-exoneration, it’s an attempt to reclaim the respectable genre of CEO memoir - turnaround, strategy, execution - while refusing the actual genre he belongs to: scandal, deception, consequences. The sentence is built to sound like leadership, but it’s really a bid for distance, framed as achievement.