Jeep expeditions he led through Baja California, Mexico, and the Australian outback, where small, all-male groups of executives and customers faced an adrenaline junkie’s ultimate challenge: to risk bodily injury with the same death-defying attitude that informed Enron’s outlandish business practices.
“Survival of the fittest” was Skilling’s motto and religion. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 classic, The Selfish Gene, was one of the CEO’s favorite books, but it’s clear that Skilling and his traders weren’t interested in the nuances of evolutionary theory, acting more like rabid junkyard dogs than those high-functioning, mutually supportive species of masterful group hunters: the lions and the wolves. As McLean and Elkind observe in the book version of The Smartest Guys in the Room, those traders and executives “who stayed and thrived were the ones who were the most ruthless in cutting deals and looking out for themselves.”
The traders eventually lost their jobs too, of course, though Skilling took the biggest hit. He was eventually convicted of nineteen counts of securities and wire fraud, sentenced to twenty-four years in prison, and obliged to pay $630 million to the government, including $180 million in fines. He and his ferocious colleagues subsequently joined a long list of clever, charismatic, unapologetically predatory leaders who’ve illustrated, over and over again for centuries, that this particular combination rarely sustains its perceived advantage in a single lifetime — and never, ever thrives in perpetuity, as so many fallen empires have illustrated throughout history.
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