::howDOESthisWORK::

i have so many things to be doing that are my tasks, let alone "manage" a team of people. i wonder if there are things that i am missing to help them succeed, or if there are things that they are working together on that we could find a solution to.

i was reading this from fast company and then what caught my eye was an article in the new your times enron offers an unlikely boost to e-mail surveillance.

i have to admit i only read it because i was looking forward to seeing where businesses were taking the next step in monitoring their employees. what i found was interesting.

"Scientists had long theorized that tracking the e-mailing and word usage patterns within a group over time - without ever actually reading a single e-mail - could reveal a lot about what that group was up to. The Enron material gave Mr. Skillicorn's group and a handful of others a chance to test that theory, by seeing, first of all, if they could spot sudden changes.

For example, would they be able to find the moment when someone's memos, which were routinely read by a long list of people who never responded, suddenly began generating private responses from some recipients? Could they spot when a new person entered a communications chain, or if old ones were suddenly shut out, and correlate it with something significant?"

i realize they were talking about looking for bad guys and mischievous behavior, but what if i could see what issues my team was struggling with? could this help me better understand where i could be focusing my attention to help them succeed?

then there was this.

There may be commercial uses for the same techniques. For example, they may enable advertisers to do word searches on individual e-mail accounts and direct pitches based on word frequency.

isn't google doing this already?

be careful world. one day you will say, "how'd they know that? is someone reading my mind?"

the interesting part is who will they be, and how much will they know.