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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."
For the younger set out there, now is the time to brush up on the transcripts from the Iran-Contra Affair hearings ("I do not recall that meeting, Senator."). The junior Bush has nothing on his father and Reagan's denial of responsibility for what those under them did. At least Nixon was decent enough to leave office.
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?
So he's already moved on to the second envelope? Did I miss the part where he blamed Carley Fiorina for everything? :)
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
I work at an high tech company with a reputation for good engineering. The engineers do the same thing. It's really a sign of arrogance more than evasion. These people truly believe that they couldn't have possibly done something wrong, so it must be someone elses fault.
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.
All of the perpetrators involved are much, much richer than you. Not brighter. Not more ethical. Not more deserving.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
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 president of my country and his group broke the law hundreds of times, and covered a lot of crimes, including murder, and got away using the exact same excuse. They just pay someone else to do the dirty work, and when the person is caught, they fire him, acting all honest and justice-seeking for firing someone involved in a wrongdoing. Except that the wrongdoing fitted only to his own interests. Yet they say that the people that got arrested were doing it without their knowledge.
Power corrupts.
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.
I made this comment a while back on Mark Hurd's background when HP, Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd were discussed.
He is just a cost cutter, who knew how to play the media and analysts. That was his forte as NCR's CEO. HP is just too big for him. NCR is the size of just the printer division at HP. 10X orders of magnitude.
Now, his incompetence is showing: I didn't know. I didn't order it. I did not know the details.
Yet one more reason to vote with your wallet and choose products which are not HP. Carly may be history, but her legacy is still affecting the company's business practices.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I was always taught that ignorance was not an excuse in the eyes of the law. If you're charged with a certain degree of responsibility (over seeing a number of corporate affairs, driving a vehicle), you're responsible for making sure everything is ok (that these corporate affairs are in order, that the vehicle is registered and insured, etc).
Nail these people to the wall.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I don't really have any good numbers that back up the reasons for the marriage disolving. All I have are a few logical suppositions and a gut feeling. Regardless, we have at least 25% of all people who become married at some point getting divorced at some later point So at least 25% of (percent-of-population-who-gets-married) can't be trusted at their word. In other words, the 50% of marriages that end in divorce, we have a bottom limit of 25% who have forsaken their marriage vows. How many of their spouses also broke their marriage vows in some way as well? Somewhere between "all" and "none", with me leaning towards "a healthy amount", which isn't an actual number, but let's not focus on all the people who didn't love or cherish their spouse, or cheated on them, etc, etc, that caused the other to divorce them. I would say at least another 15% are guilty of this part.
I'm not even going to delve into all the other ways in which people break promises. Promises to ourselves, to our God(s), to our family or loved ones, to our landlord, etc, etc. Not quite the same as a marriage vow or an oath of office, but still indicitive of how much our word means to us, collectively, as a society.
My argument is not that Clinton did or did not participate in a particularly dreadful act (choice of wench aside), or that it doesn't matter because it's his private life. My argument is that our society is full-up with people who can't keep their word on even the smallest of things, yet they are in positions of power - civil servants, CEOs, teachers, firemen, policemen, etc, etc. Yet we still trust them to do the oaths related to their job. Whether Policeman Bob bangs 16 women in one year, while he's married, is moot. We still expect him to do his duty when he's in uniform. A CEO can cheat on his wife all he'd like, as long as, while he's at work, he continues furthering the interests of the stockholders. I think it's rather unfair that Clinton was effectively turned into a Pariah when so many others in our society, who are in positions of power and trust, go completely unmolested for the exact same reasons. If Republicans continued their War on Immorality after the Clinton impeachement proceedings, on all those other people who participate in immoral acts (congressmen who break the law, for example), I wouldn't take issue with anything Clinton was put through. Well, no, I would have said "surely you understand there's a difference between getting a blowjob and being suspected of accepting 90,000$ in bribery charges. The latter is clearly Abuse of Public Trust 1, whereas the former is, at worst, Abuse of Public Trust 16." But that's a minor disagreement, not cynical dismay at the hypocrisy of our countrymen - from congressmen down to every last citizen who got seriously outraged at such transgressions, all the wall ignoring their own failings that violated public trust.
I understand the desire to hold the President of the United States to a higher standard, but as far as I'm concerned, that should apply to all of those in power - both in the public sphere and the private. I'm not even talking legally - I'm talking solely social outrage.
Ah well. A man can dream.