Slashdot Mirror
The Culture of Evasion
theodp writes "In the wake of Patricia Dunn's resignation, Wired's Fred Vogelstein walked away less than impressed with HP CEO's Mark Hurd's spying mea culpa. He says it smacked more of standard corporate ass covering than leadership, especially coming 3 weeks after the scandal broke. His sentiments are echoed in Computerworld's Culture of Evasion, which was written before Hurd mounted an I-knew-nothing-defense. Hurd claims that he bailed out on a meeting that approved the spying, neglected to read the spying report directed to him, and was clueless about the tracer technology employed in the reporter-baiting false e-mail he personally gave thumbs-up to."
So, he doesn't stick around for important meetings adn doesn't follow up afterwards to find out what happened, he doesn't read reports directed to him, he "doesn't recall" authorising the infection of a journalist's PC with tracking software and (according to him) he's too stupid to wonder where all the confidential phone records were coming from.
When's he going to be fired for gross incompetence?
No disagreements with the article here. I'm shocked that she didn't resign or that
she wasn't fired the day she stepped down from the chair. Instead she stayed on the board another 3
weeks!! In another, even bigger joke, HP
is co-sponsoring a privacy award!!
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
You know, when a CEO like Hurd insists they are not culpable of any illegal behavior because of sheer incompetence and ignorance of what their subordinates are doing, then they really should be fired by the board of directors immediately. There's really no excuse to keep them. How can any company have confidence in a leader who willfully uses incompetence as a defense to wrong doing?
The writer has obviously never been a CEO, or even stopped for more than ten seconds to think about what it might be like to be one, and what the reponsibilities are.
... Condemning actions, pushing out wrongdoers and apologizing for mistakes counts as leadership right after a scandal breaks. Three weeks in it looks like standard corporate ass covering.
( Quotes from TFA are in italics )
Maybe he likes to think before he acts, maybe even consult a lawyer or two. Do the stockholders really want a CEO who shoots from the hip? Especially on issues as important as this? We're talking about a multi-million dollar company here that is front page news. The decisions are big, maybe big enough to make or break the company. I'd take a week or three to think if I were making decisions on that scale.
Second, he took no questions, choosing instead to let an investigative attorney who works for him, do the talking.
He hired a pro to do the job right. I'll bet he hires a geek to run his IT dept, and an accountant to do his bookkeeping. Probably even has a professional janitorial staff clean his office. One of the primary rsponsibilities of management is to find good people and then delegate.
Lastly, he refused to do the obvious: acknowledge that HP's leak investigation was a bad idea from the beginning.
When you have an employee who is doing things that - in your opinion as managment - hurt the company, it is your obligation to the stockholders to find out who it is and stop them. Whether they be leakers, thieves, whatever, the CEO is responsible to the shareholders. Had nothing been done to stop leakers, and had that course of action turned out badly, then he looks even worse.
It borders on pathological, and is perhaps the biggest day-to-day frustration in dealing with these people. Bad enough when someone's incompetence and/or malicious intent causes me harm, but any rational person quickly reaches the point where their only desire is to go immediately to their offices and beat in their skull with a blunt instrument, screaming all the while that all you want is for them to FUCKING ADMIT THEY FUCKED UP.
Fuck Slashdot
More to the point, wasn't the whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley that it's Hurd's *job* to know about the things he's claiming not to? "I didn't know what my subordinates were doing" isn't supposed to wash any more as a valid excuse, at least not under the law.
The difference being, of course, that "I didn't inhale" and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" were matters that could just as well have been kept private without significant financial repercussion or threat to our privacy and freedom, but for the stupidity of those who act out of blind hatred.
Have we really lost all sense of not only what's right and what's wrong, but what's important and what's not?
I know, dumb question.
I took a couple random anthropology classes back in college. One concept that was passingly mentioned was the common classification of cultures as shame-cultures versus guilt-cultures. To suit my argument, I will grossly oversimplify to say members of a guilt society feel bad if they do something wrong, but those in a shame society only feel bad if anyone finds out what they did. It seems to me that the dangers of corporate liability is begining to develop something even nastier (IMHO) than a shame culture. Corporate executives feel bad not if they do something bad, or even everyone believes they did something bad, but if they have to admit that what they did was wrong.
An actual anthropologist might have better insights, but this doesn't look much like "progress" from where I sit.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.