Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

There is a peculiar kind of self-mythology that only business disasters produce: the insistence that the wreckage was once a cathedral. Skilling’s repetition of “we were” works like a drumbeat for inevitability, a rhetorical time machine that asks you to stand inside the pre-collapse confidence and treat it as proof of virtue. The phrase “what I thought” is the tell: not an admission of deceit, exactly, but a strategic pivot to subjectivity, where intentions can be praised even if outcomes are indictable.

The subtext is a Silicon Valley-style moral alibi before Silicon Valley fully owned the genre. “Fantastic company,” “great people,” “changing the way the marketplace operated” translates to: disruption is inherently good, and scale is its own ethics. Notice how “changing” appears twice, as if repetition can launder the ambiguity. Changing a marketplace can mean innovating; it can also mean gaming rules, exploiting opacity, or turning complexity into a profit center.

Then comes the masterpiece of reframing: “creating a market…that had never existed before.” It’s a classic capitalist creation story, positioning Enron not as a trader manipulating energy commodities, but as a pioneer conjuring modernity from nothing. In context - post-deregulation energy markets and Enron’s aggressive financial engineering - “creating a market” reads less like public service and more like constructing a casino and calling it civic infrastructure. Skilling isn’t just defending Enron; he’s defending the idea that ambition, dressed as innovation, should be insulated from moral scrutiny.