Time & Perspective Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

Skilling’s phrasing is a master class in corporate passivity: a big historical rupture rendered as weather. “There just happened to be a decision point” turns a power grab into an accident, as if the CEO job drifted into his lap like a missed calendar invite. It’s the language of plausible deniability, engineered to sand down agency until responsibility can’t get traction.

The timeline matters. “Fall of the year 2000” plants us at the brink of the California electricity crisis, when deregulation, market design flaws, and aggressive trading strategies created a perfect arena for profiteering. Skilling’s “as you remember” is a subtle bid for shared memory and shared innocence; it recruits the listener into a pre-agreed narrative in which “we” are merely witnesses to “real problems,” not participants with fingerprints. That “we” is doing double duty, too: it’s corporate camaraderie on the surface, diffusion of blame underneath.

Notice what’s absent. No mention of Enron’s trading desk, no admission of incentives, no acknowledgement that “problems” in a market can be monetized when you control information and volatility. The sentence is constructed to make his ascension sound like reluctant stewardship during an external crisis. In reality, it signals opportunity: turbulence as a career accelerant.

Coming from a man later convicted for fraud tied to Enron’s collapse, the quote reads less like recollection than like preemptive defense. It’s not selling leadership; it’s selling inevitability, the oldest trick in the accountability-avoidance playbook.