Want to know if your company is about to go under on account of crookedness on an epic scale, or even general criminal incompetence? Check e-mail logs! A couple of scientists who got access to Enron's e-mail system took a look at how much mail was sent during critical moments in 2001 before the energy giant went under. Although they expected to see a huge spike in activity immediately before the collapse, it wasn't the case.
[R]esearchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.We'll catch you back here eight years from now when we finally get access to Lehman's logs and see how that all played out.Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.
This is fascinating, from a risk manager perspective. Are there tell-tale signs of systemic failure in this data?
The enron collapse is a bit of an anamoly, in that all of enron's e-mails went public. FERC, the agency that regulates energy, requested documents from Enron; normally, a company would go through its e-mails and decide which were actually relevant and which not. But Enron was collapsing and basically said, hey, we don't have the money to pay people to sort through this stuff, you do it. And FERC said, it's not our obligation to sort through stuff. And then FERC put all of the emails on the internet.
As you can imagine, there was a lot of personal information on there, including things like social security numbers, credit card numbers. And a lot of intimate detail, like cheating spouses making plans with lovers, etc.
It's almost as interesting, and as unique a resource, as the AOL search terms that were put up on the internet.
As a person whose job depends on constructing an elaborate lattice of lies, I do not find this at all surprising.
Is that you, Mr. Ensign?
I suppose this is exactly the sort of pattern - once identified - that people charges with corporate governance should be looking for.
If they see it, and ignore it, they go to jail. If they don't see it because they weren't looking, they go to jail.
Basically, more people in positions of oversight simply need to go to jail. But not a place like Rikers. Seriously, we don't need the people already there exposed to any more bad influences.
I suppose this is exactly the sort of pattern - once identified - that people charged with corporate governance should be looking for.
If they see it, and ignore it, they go to jail. If they don't see it because they weren't looking, they go to jail.
Basically, more people in positions of oversight simply need to go to jail. But not a place like Rikers. Seriously, we don't need the people already there exposed to any more bad influences.
I suppose if you make a typo and double post, you should also go to jail. In this case, Rikers sounds just about right.