In his joint paper with Evan Offstein, "On the Virtues of Secrecy in Organizations," Ronald Dufresne, an assistant professor of management at Saint Joseph' s University, argues that "secrets are necessary, if not essential, to organizational survival and competitiveness." He believes: "secrecy that delays competitive retaliation provides competitive advantage." Furthermore, secrecy provides leaders more freedom to be creative and open to unique ideas behind the scenes before needing to air those ideas publicly.

In the event that the WikiLeaks about those corporations are timely and relevant, they could negate Bank of America and BP's competitive advantages. Dufresne uses Apple as an example of an organization which leveraged the power of secrets as demonstrated by the marketing impact and the buzz that accompanied the secrecy of the iPhone.

An essential process in managing secrets is to compartmentalize information so individual organizational members or departments are unable to "connect the dots" and transform that information into intelligence. Dufresne argues that the key is to find the balance between compartmentalizing secrets so "no one individual can put the secrets together to comprehend the 'bigger picture' and 'expansive transparent knowledge sharing,' because 'tilting too much one way or the other jeopardizes the organization’s long-term competitiveness.'