February 2005

People

SEC Streamliner
Corey Booth, MBA ’95

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID DEAL

Before the Enron and WorldCom scandals hit the press, if you wanted to compare their financial data to others in their industries, you could have accessed the EDGAR information system of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, found the numbers you wanted, and laboriously typed them into your own spreadsheet. That’s still what you would do, but Corey Booth, MBA ’95, is working hard to change that.

A former McKinsey consultant, Booth was appointed chief information officer of the SEC in January 2004. Under pressure from Congress to improve the agency’s capacity to protect investors and maintain fair, efficient markets, he is tackling multiple paper and data problems with a multimillion-dollar budget. One priority is getting companies to start using standardized data tags so that information reported to regulators can be more easily compared, not just by the SEC’s own investigators but by investors using public data. “The economists at the Business School would probably describe this as trying to lower the transaction costs of stock and mutual fund portfolio ownership and analysis,” Booth explains. “There is not enough analysis partly because it is so labor intensive now.”

Booth is also trying to make it easier for SEC employees to investigate potential fraud. The agency is literally inundated with millions of pages of documents from 12,000 companies annually and, under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, is required to formally review the filings of one-third of the companies each year. What’s more, when an investigation is launched, trucks dump thousands more paper and electronic documents on the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. “We had 8,000 boxes lining the hallways of headquarters when I arrived,” says Booth, who “worried about workplace injuries because of the potential for boxes to fall on people.”

Using scanners and optical character recognition software to create electronic copies, Booth has been able to move most of the paper into suburban storage. He is now tackling the other high priority issues, including tagged data in filings, improved analysis tools for quantitative data, and workflow and content management tools.

“We were asked by Congress to be more effective,” he says, “and it’s very clear that staffing will only go so far. The rest has to come from technology improvements.”

—KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

Alumni to Know

Faculty

Newsmakers

Fatherly Advisor
Peter Spokes, MBA ’79

Rising through the ranks of General Mills while fathering six children, Peter Spokes experienced many conflicting demands on his time. One important lesson he has learned since: Executive dads respond to brief to-do lists offered at the right time.

As the executive vice president of the National Center for Fathering, Spokes, MBA ’79, oversees day-to-day operations of the Kansas City-based center. His responsibilities include making sure the center’s weekly email letter with “five practical action items” for being a good father goes out to 30,000 dads on Thursday nights. “We want it to arrive on Friday morning because that is when most dads have discretionary time ahead,” he says.

What action items can Spokes offer executive dads who travel on business? For school-age kids, he suggests “stick a note in your child’s textbook 10 pages ahead of where they are.” For younger children, “plan a specific time to call from the road because they need to hear your voice.” For military dads, he suggests “read your child’s favorite story on a videocamera” before shipping out.

When dads need more complex advice, they can go to the organization’s website, fathers.com, or take training courses offered by the center or churches and social service agencies trained by it. (With Spokes’s business sense, the nonprofit center earns half its financial support by offering resources to others who promote good fathering.)

“We work with dads across the spectrum from those in prison cells or homeless to guys in executive suites who haven’t a clue what their teenagers are doing,” Spokes told his class reunion last June. He is passionate about spreading grassroots fathering skills, partly because “40 percent of kids in America will go to bed tonight in a home where their dad doesn’t live,” he says, and many “social ills, including drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and failure in school are correlated with the lack of an involved father.”

“It’s presumptuous for us to think we can affect [those statistics] tomorrow,” Spokes says, “but hopefully in a generation or two, we will.”

—KATHLEEN O'TOOLE