Conspiracy of Fools

Newspapers around the world reported on October 24th that the former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, aged 52, was sentenced to 24 years for frauds. If no parole was to be given, he would be locked up in jail until he was 76 years old.

Just 6 years ago, who could have believed the most powerful executive in the biggest blue-chip energy trading company in the US would end up his career like that?

According to the non-fiction 'Conspiracy of Fools' by Kurt Eichenwald, Jeffrey Skilling graduated as a Baker Scholar (the top 5% of the class) from Harvard Business School in 1979. He was soon offered a position at McKinsey & Company (the cradle of many super-egoistic top executives) renowned for "arrogance that matched his own" ~ to paraphrase Eichenwald's words~ before he met his future mentor and boss at Enron, Ken Lay, on a client's meeting when Skilling was about to present his recommendations as a management consultant. His assignment: should the client move its headquarters from Omaha in Nebraska to Houston in Texas (I wonder how much McKinsey would charge for such consultancy work!)?

Skilling came from a modest family. His father was happy-go-lucky but his mother was a chronic complainer, putting all the blame on her husband for a life that didn't go her own way. Even when her son got a stellar report card from school, she would tell him, "You think things are going well now? Just wait. Things 'll fall apart. Sooner or later, they'll get you!" Sometimes I'm amazed how terribly insightful a mom could be about her offspring's future.

I haven't finished reading the book 'Conspiracy of Fools' yet. But when you read from the news, or on TV, about what's the latest happening in real life to the characters portrayed in the book, you'd get a feeling that the characters' lives were unfolding to you. And you couldn't help but think aloud: "Oh, Christ! Is it that real?"