Slashdot Mirror
HP's Dunn as Newsweek Cover Girl
theodp writes "In The Boss Who Spied on Her Board, Newsweek likens HP Chairwoman Pattie Dunn's attempts to escape culpability with her I-knew-nothing defense to both a head of state, who wants 'plausible deniability' while ordering an assassination plot, and to Henry II, who had the Archbishop of Canterbury removed by simply muttering 'Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?' in front of his knights."
At one stage, HP was "the best". They made the best calculators, best test equipment, best everything they touched. Their slide probably started with getting into the commodity PC industry (PCs and printers).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I don't think it's a gender issue. They don't teach falling-down-on-your-own-sword in the business schools anymore. These days you get a brownie point for blaming the next guy/gal over and/or the news media. Taking personal responsibiity is so old school.
The board meeting is today, I predict she will step down after they ask her to "Dunn has no plans to step down but would do so if asked by the board, according to HP spokesman Ryan Donovan. HP's board plans to meet Sunday, he added."
Denis the SQL Menace http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/
What this person did is just totally inexcusable and they came out looking like a total dimwit on top of it. Who cares about their sex? What this person did was WRONG and they deserved to be given a hard time. If a man (and again, why does it matter) did the same thing I can guarantee that people aren't going to hesitate to criticize him. So maybe the question you should ask is given two people of different sexes (hypothetically) who commit the exact same crime under the same circumstances, why should we treat them differently?
The Black Adder! It's depressing that I remember more history from The Black Adder than years of public education in the UK. One of the best comedy series ever!
Spy on a large customer that might be planning to jump to another vendor for major IT services? Spy on business partners or VARs? Flat out, the reason there are so many leaks surrounding HP is that the behavior (starting during Fiorina's reign) of the management and the board was terrible. Of course there were leaks. It's the only way to ever put the brakes on the amoral behavior of scumbags like these. The way they've been treaing people for years? Of course there are disgruntled people leaking information. They're lucky it hasn't been worse. I expect, now that Dunn has been wounded finding the leaker, the board's going to have to pull an "Old Yeller" and get her off before everyone else is contaminated. It may be too late, though.
If private investigators are acting illegally, they are the ones whose names should be known. They are the ones who are supposed to go to jail, and lose their licenses.
Private investigators ARE licensed. They ARE supposed to act WITHIN the law. If any company chooses to hire licensed private investigators, then it's understandable that you assume this, i.e. don't necessarily need to ask questions about their precise methods.
Who were these so-called private investigators? Is this is the first time these private investigators have broken the law in order to get a paycheck? Who were their other clients prior to their HP contract? If the P.I.'s were ordered to do something illegal, why didn't they object?
Why aren't the journalists focusing on them?
Funny, i've always heard it as "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest," although admitedly neither i nor i expect any other american actually learned about it in school as a child, so it is most certainly _not_ "school-kid knowledge of history" for everyone. Secondly, if you want people to listen to you you might want to adopt a slightly less agressive tone. "If you're going to quote someone at least get it right" is much more likely to be taken as elitism than a phrase like "i was told the original quote was" or something along those lines.
And lastly, before you chastise someone else for getting the quote wrong, make sure you yourself have got it right. Wikipedia certainly isn't infallible, but their page on Thomas Becket says it was "passionate words from the angry king" and then lists several phrases that were reputedly used, so no one is really sure what the exact utterance was to begin with. Not to mention the fact that this was during the period when middle english was being spolen and what he said probably only had a passing relationship with a modern english interpretation of the same words. I therefore strongly suspect that _all_ of us are wrong, or all of us are right, depending on how you choose to look at it. It seems rather unlikely however that you can conclusively proove you are more correct than the person you corrected.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The 2nd part of that makes no sense. And no, she was NOT ethical in this.
And?
Just because one person is not ethical does not make it ethical to take un-ethical actions to find that person.
Nooooooo..... it seems that she STARTED investigating reporters. And people related to reporters.
Drop the word "officially". Dunn authorized it. Dunn instigated it. It is Dunn's responsibility.
And so
If some other people don't object, that does not make it ethical.
No, it would not be. This type of behaviour is un-ethical no matter who the target is.
No, it has not.
I'm hoping that, because of this, the "pretexting" practice becomes a Federal Crime.
"couldn't be bothered"?
She hired a company to actively search for information.
And when she received their report, she did NOT ask how they came up with information that would not be available outside of a court order.
That is un-ethical.
She is un-ethical.
I think whatever words he said he would have said them in French. 1066 and all that...
I disagree. Corporate governance is important. I'm pretty sure I couldn't get away with what Dunn has done. Now my question is whether my bosses could.
First of all, it comes as no surprise to me that there is some debate as to the actual phrase. You should be really really careful when you correct somebody over a trivial matter because more often than not, you're running headlong into a tangential nerd-cliff where everybody stops looking at the forest and starts arguing over one leaf on one tree in that forest.
Nobody ever said Let them eat cake either, but correcting somebody when they utter those words to illustrate a point is about as pedantic as you can be. If the meaning of the phrase is retained, and the message is succinctly conveyed, what the hell is so important about the words unless you're quoting them with the actual intention of accurate archival?
"Old man yells at systemd"