Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Skilling

The sentence is a masterclass in corporate self-mythology: a man trying to sound like an architect while quietly sanding down the fingerprints. Skilling opens with the softener of choice for insiders under scrutiny - "Well, actually" - a verbal throat-clear that signals correction while buying time. It frames what follows as clarification, not defense, even as the clauses begin to tangle.

Then comes the real maneuver: "consultant to former companies of Enron, or predecessor companies of Enron". The doubling back is not accidental; its bureaucratic redundancy turns a simple timeline into a fog bank. By multiplying entities ("former", "predecessor"), Skilling dilutes responsibility. If the company is a moving target, accountability becomes a shell game. The listener is nudged to think in corporate genealogy instead of individual agency.

"I joined in 1990" is the clean anchor, the one date he offers with confidence. It positions him as a builder arriving at the moment of creation, not as someone inheriting or exploiting a culture. The phrase "to really start" adds moral sheen: not just to expand, but to begin something authentic. "Wholesale merchant business" lands like sanitized ambition, a euphemism that obscures the financial alchemy Enron became infamous for.

Context does the heavy lifting here. In the shadow of Enron's collapse, this kind of language reads as preemptive narrative control: transform a story about engineered deception into one about entrepreneurial innovation. The subtext is simple: I was there to make markets, not to break rules - and if the past is messy, blame the org chart.