Following a crisis, regulators and managers naturally take steps to prevent a recurrence. In 2002, after Enron and WorldCom succumbed to massive accounting fraud, U.S. legislators passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which gave directors and executives new oversight responsibilities. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis many large banks changed their business models, and other companies implemented systems to better manage credit risks or eliminate overreliance on mathematical models.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2015 issue (pp.20–21) of Harvard Business Review.