I was mesmerized by Malcolm Gladwell’s “Open Secrets: Enron and the Perils of Full Disclosure” in the 8 January New Yorker. While it doesn’t let Mr Skilling off the hook, Gladwell does argue that the info needed to declare Enron a house of cards had been long (and pretty much fully) available via public filings. Gladwell’s intriguing point is that this is in part a byproduct of, as the title suggests, too much data available—the problems were hidden amidst thousands upon thousands of pages of filed info—and no one “saw it.”
