In 2004 a Finnish tax auditor died at his desk and it took two days for his 100 colleagues on the same floor to notice. It took Société Générale several weeks to notice that Jérôme Kerviel had lost €5 billion. Such is the haze of corporate life. You can either spend your time dying or unbalancing the global economy, but the pointless meetings and the odd style of language will still continue, unaffected, all around.

How could nobody notice that Mr Kerviel was doing something very different from his day job for so long? After all, his illicit dealings and the covering of his tracks would have been a full-time task. The reason, of course, is that in a large office, no one really knows what anyone else is doing from day to day, hour to hour.

The Kerviel episode provides us with a rare snapshot of the truth, which, once grasped, explains a great deal about how people behave, how they speak and how they succeed in a large office environment. Between others' perception of an individual's activities and the reality there is potentially a significant gap, a gap so big that it can cost a company the equivalent of the annual GDP of Afghanistan in one fell swoop. We should call it “the Kerviel Gap”.

Office workers might have never talked out loud about the Kerviel Gap, but they are nonetheless often aware at some level of the opportunities it presents. Mr Kerviel used the gap to test his ability to make a financial killing. Others capitalise on it by amusing themselves on the internet all day. But, mostly, people exploit it to present a false self-image to propel themselves up the hierarchy.

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Jerome Kerviel's lawyer claims executives at the French bank benefited from the successful investments of the rogue trader

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Multimedia

• Full coverage of the SocGen scandal

• Blog: Charles Bremner on SocGen

• Video: Patrick Hosking on the impact of fraud

BACKGROUND

• Who Knew What and When?

• SocGen director probed over €100m share sale

• Ex-SocGen risk auditor calls systems a sham

The language of the office, for example, is the direct offspring of the Kerviel Gap. People talk unintelligible nonsense at work because in the absence of any accurate understanding of the value of their contribution, they feel they can impress the people that matter by sounding clever instead.

Office politics is another beneficiary of the Kerviel Gap. When genuine performance is somewhat hidden, individuals will seek to differentiate themselves from numerous, equally qualified candidates, by forging relationships with those who can help them climb the career ladder. Women are among the gap's victims, being less naturally adept at the chummy clubbiness that explains many a man's success.

When considering the Kerviel story, it would be unwise to assume that its implications lie solely in the minutiae of arcane financial practice. It also reveals so much of the essence of the corporate environment. For large companies intent on raising performance, and their naive employees who think that they will get noticed if they simply work hard, the message is loud and clear. Mind the Kerviel Gap.

David Bolchover is the author of The Living Dead: The Shocking Truth About Office Life

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