Enron Jeff Skilling Quotes

IT—especially with its role so greatly enlarged by the arrival of the Internet—has changed not only how we work and conduct business, but also how we (and our customers) play, how we consume, and how we educate our next generations. And yet the IT phenomenon, so evident in the expenditures of every organization, has not yet achieved management attention equal to other areas, such as finance, marketing, operations, and human resources. In far too many companies, IT remains a black box that business managers rarely try to see inside. When business managers do engage in IT discussions, often they bring little expertise to bear. Few feel apologetic about their IT inadequacies. But the time is coming when “I’m not an IT person” will be no more adequate as a manager’s defense in the aftermath of a major corporate problem than Jeff Skilling’s now notorious “I’m not an accountant”—that CEOs effort to explain his failure to foresee or prevent Enron’s spectacular implosion.

Skilling also had a tendency to oversimplify, and he largely disregarded—indeed, he had an active distaste for—the messy details involved in executing a plan. What thrilled Skilling, always, was the intellectual purity of an idea, not the translation of that idea into reality. “Jeff Skilling is a designer of ditches, not a digger of ditches,” an Enron executive said years later. He was often too slow—even unwilling—to recognize when the reality didn’t match the theory. Over time his arrogance hardened, and he became so sure that he was the smartest guy in the room that anyone who disagreed with him was summarily dismissed as just not bright enough to “get it.