Did you hate cliques in high school? You should hate them as an adult too.

How can you tell when your organization is in trouble? “[E]mployees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.” It may not be the most surprising insight I’ve ever come across, but it is an important point, and it’s the conclusion reached in a study of the emails sent by Enron employees during the company’s final 18 months. According to New Scientist, the study showed that “the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.”