E-mail reveals real leaders: Network analysis maps companies' informal structure.
Want to know how your organization really works - who speaks to whom, who holds the power? Then study the flow of internal e-mail, say scientists at global technology firm Hewlett-Packard.
The idea is familiar to people doing social network analysis: analyze communications and draw graphs that show who talks to whom. It's nice to see this in a Nature article.
Unfortunately, they opted not to show the resulting graph.