KENNETH LAY, of Enron, pleaded ignorance. So did Bernard Ebbers, of WorldCom. The success of this courtroom strategy relied on whether the jurors would believe that these highly paid leadership icons could turn up for work every day and be oblivious to internal shenanigans. Whether they would believe that corporate culture is routinely characterised by concealment, detachment and opacity.

In the end, the two men were convicted, and corporate culture was acquitted. It was decided that these dynamic, astute businessmen who had built up such sophisticated and successful businesses must surely have known about the large-scale fraud that was being perpetrated down the corridor. Commentators queue up to tell the world that the verdicts serve as a warning shot to the business world. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the individual cases, it would have done the business world much more good in the long term if these high-profile figures had been let off. This might have concentrated attention on the huge and inevitable systemic weaknesses of large organisations, rather than on tales of personal greed, hubris and dishonesty.

No chief executive “knows everything that’s going on in his company”, Lay said in one of his speeches. He blamed Andrew Fastow, his chief financial officer, for all the misdeeds. “I did not know what he was doing,” Lay claimed. Even if he was lying about the specifics, it’s hard to contest the general point. Enron had 20,000 employees. WorldCom had 88,000. Transparency is unattainable, and subterfuge, serious or minor, is therefore unavoidable.

If you work in a large organisation, ask yourself this: Do you know what the people on the other side of the floor do every day? Sure, you know what their job titles say, you know what they are supposed to do, in very broad terms anyway, but if you were asked to write down the minutiae of their daily routine, wouldn’t you spend a considerable period looking out of the window, chewing your pen?

Chief executives will often know little about what their board members get up to, and next to nothing about what happens at the grassroots. This is not because they are stupid, but because they are human. In a sense, Lay and Ebbers were ruined by the cult of leadership, propagated by countless business books, that will have previously served them so well. The mythology held that those who ran successful companies were vested with a rare insight and knowledge. This is great for the ego, and helps to fend off those who covet your job, but quite inconvenient when you are standing in the dock telling all and sundry that you didn’t have a clue.

In the end, they would have been better served by the more discomfiting truth: that our corporate leaders are in their job as much through luck, patronage or clever political manoeuvring as through any advanced business acumen. That beneath them, in the fog of corporate life, where performance is often either invisible or immeasurable, image and perception are the engines of career progress. And the right image entails ensuring that you are constantly associated with good news. Delivering bad news upwards should preferably be left to the mug next to you.

Capitalism relies, for its efficient functioning, on innovation and on the free exchange of information. We should at least begin to ask ourselves whether the economies of scale that a large company enjoys are too often outweighed by the negative impact of its inherent conformity and impenetrability.

Do you get into work early in the morning, keen to advertise your conscientiousness to the people that matter? If so, all you are probably displaying is a hopeless naivety. According to a survey this month by MRINetwork, one of the world’s largest recruitment networks, people who tend to arrive in the early hours are much less likely to get recognition for their efforts than those who stay later in the evening.

It is therefore not only the economy that suffers from all the unproductive posturing that goes on in large companies. If people simply worked hard and then went home, the failing concept of family life might also receive a welcome boost.

David Bolchover is author of The Living Dead: Switched off, Zoned out — the Shocking Truth about Office Life

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