Dream Job Turns Into a Nightmare

Charismatic Strategist

At Enron, Skilling played by his own rules and bent others to his will. The son of a valve company manager, he grew up in New Jersey and Illinois, studied engineering at Southern Methodist University and earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

He was a born leader, said his youngest brother, Mark, who recalled his brother as a uniquely charismatic and creative child who led the adventures, from dam building to re-enacting the Apollo moon landing. His enthusiasms were ever-changing; the constant was the other children always followed him.

Skilling began working with Enron in 1986 as a consultant from the influential McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, whose partners had the ears of CEOs around the world. James W. Crownover, who hired Skilling at McKinsey's Houston office, remembered him simply as "outstanding in every respect" and "one of the most talented people we ever had."

A charismatic strategist, Skilling quickly won the confidence of Enron founder Kenneth L. Lay with his innovative ideas about trading natural gas.

"I don't think he has a non-strategic bone in his body," Lay said of Skilling.

Lay made him president of Enron's trading operations in 1990. Although Skilling had never run a business of any kind, he denounced traditional business practices in mesmerizing fashion.

He and Lay pursued a vision of a new Enron that would reinvent itself from a staid gas pipeline company into a global energy trader. In 1997, Lay made him company president, in charge of daily operations.

Physically short and slight, Skilling cultivated an in-your-face persona. He mocked competitors as foundering clipper ships. He led favored subordinates -- his "Mighty Man Force" -- on adventure trips, biking across Mexico and racing SUVs in the Australian Outback.

In April 2001, when Skilling had been Enron's chief executive all of two months, Worth magazine named him No. 2 of the 50 top chief executives in the nation, behind only Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.

Skilling "could out-argue God," recalled Tom Peters, a best-selling management expert who had worked with him at McKinsey.

But he also found smaller targets inviting, bullying the woman who ran office administration. From the moment he became an Enron executive, Skilling treated Mary Wyatt, a vice president in property management, as an enemy, deriding the "building Gestapo" as the epitome of narrow-minded traditionalism.

Disdainful of Enron's modular office system, Skilling demanded that his trading office have glass walls, to make it look more like a bank, Wyatt recalled. "That was pretty much the beginning of the end of the standard workplace," she said.