Okay, let’s get this out of the way – The Wire is by far the best drama on television today, and the best cop show in television history. There, I said it, and I feel better. The show is a triumph of substance over style, featuring a slow-burning, character-driven plot that cares about the issues of the place it lives in. It’s like a great baseball game, or a brilliant chess match, in which seemingly nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens, and then, suddenly, everything happens, and all of the connections become clear. A Wired organization, then, is the opposite of a Danian organization. A Wired organization is so well-aligned that each employee is a critical employee, each function is a critical function. A Wired organization would no sooner eliminate its quality group in a cost-cutting move than it would fire the CEO and executive staff in order to meet a quarterly EBITDA number. Most companies are somewhere between Danian and Wired organizations. But all organizations are in a constant state of becoming, and we would do well to get good at understanding the direction in which our businesses are moving.
To that end, I’ve come up with an organizational Rorschach Test that anyone can take, inspired by the Enron book Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald. My premise is that there are two critical lessons that can be taken from Enron’s historic collapse; the idea here is to apply these lessons to your own organization. Ask your organization whether it agrees with the statements below, where its practices are in relationship to these lessons, and (if it agrees with the statements) which lesson it believes is the most critical. Your answers will place your company somewhere on the Danian-Wired continuum. Ready? Here we go:
1. The singular lesson from the Enron collapse was one of conflicted interest, as with the auditors who didn’t audit for fear of losing other consulting fees, or analysts who inflated recommendations for fear of losing underwriting opportunities.
2. The primary lesson from the Enron collapse was the steep cost of valuing intelligence over wisdom.
Each lesson is valid in its own way. And like the Rorschach, there’s no right answer. The scoring is subjective. The idea is to answer honestly, pay attention to how you answer, and to place your organization somewhere on the Danian-Wired continuum. Once done, pay attention to which direction your business is moving.
