When Jeff Skilling applied to Harvard Business School,

the professor asked him if he was smart.

He replied, 'I'm fucking smart.'

One of his favorite books was The Selfish Gene,

about the ways human nature is steered by greed

and competition in the service of passing on our genes.

At Enron.

Skilling wanted to set free the basic instincts

of survival of the fittest.

Jeff had a very Darwinian view of how the world worked.

He was famous for saying once in Enron's early years,

that money was the only thing that motivated people.

Skilling's notion of how the world should work

really trickled down,

and affected everything about how Enron did business.

He instituted the system know as the PRC,

or Perfomance Review Committee.

It required that people be graded from a one to a five.

And roughly ten percent of people had to be a five.

And those people were supposed to be fired.