Thursday, January 16, 2014

Correctly Assuming Guilt, Deutsche Bank to Randomly Suspend Traders During Various Probes

Just thinking out loud here, creating a sort of management souffle from a couple simple ideas and seasoning with Onion.
From the Financial Times:

Deutsche Bank suspends traders amid global forex probe
The global investigation into the manipulation of foreign exchange markets intensified on Wednesday when Deutsche Bank, the world’s largest forex trader, became the latest bank to suspend several of its employees.
Deutsche, the world’s most powerful bank in foreign exchange trading, put several middle-ranking traders in

The move comes after it examined emails and communications amid a global probe into possible manipulation and collusion in the $5.3tn a day currency market.

Banks’ internal probes, initiated by several regulators in Europe and the US with help from Asian authorities, have so far led to to more than a dozen traders across the world’s largest lenders fired or suspended....MORE 
The story also reports the internal probes are both widening and deepening. Yikes. 

Now combine that with the inverse of the smartest piece of management research since the time-and-motion studies of the teens and '20's, and then throw in a bit of Hawthorne Effect:
A repost from November 2010.

It sounds like a Dilbert strip but it's true.
From the abstract at Physics arXiv:
The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study
...Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.

Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence. 
Here is the paper presented at Econophysics Colloquium 2009 (55 page PDF)...MORE
And there you are.
Or vice versa you could go with random internal probes.
Should you prefer your vice, versa.