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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."
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?
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?
More astonishing is that Mark "I don't recall" Hurd seems to have managed to get a promotion out of this, adding Chairman to his list of titles.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
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.
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.
No, stockholders want a CEO who can best lead their company through difficult business cycles as well as the inevitable ethical or political flareup. Seeing that spying on corporate directors and reporters using fraudulent means (pretexting), attempting to install malicious software on others computers via e-mail is hardly unethical hardly requires a week or three to wrestle with. Stockholders of multi-BILLION dollar companies do not pay their CEO's tens of millions of dollars (options included) to let things spin out of control in the press for several weeks while they ponder options.
Again, CEO's are the public face of the company and are paid accordingly to be its leaders. In times of crises, leaders are looked to for answers and guidance. If yo're "hiding" behind lawyers you're abrogating that role, implying that maybe you don't have what it tkaes to be a CEO at best, or what your company has done is fairly illegal at worst.
Again, these are not employees of HP. They are directors from the board of directors responsible for the overseeing the management and company operations on behalf of the stockholders (they're voted in by the stockholders) and while they receive compensation as directors they are not employees in the strict sense. If you are spying on your directors one can only imagaine what you are doing to your rank-and-file employees.
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.
I've been bitten by CEO's shooting from the hip before, so I completely understand that concern. However, the CEO is looked to for leadership in times of crisis. Arguably, leadership is the primary role of the CEO. This one let things stew and flounder for weeks. Two days is a reasonable timeframe to compose a well thought-out, well-informed response. Three weeks is not helpful in a leader.
Sometimes you do need to act quickly to stem off negative press and recover from disasters. He did not.
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.
True, but we're talking about a point of public perception. He definitely should have hired someone to prep him and train him about the responses to questions which may arise. But when people are questioning your integrity and your leadership, in the eyes of the public to delegate answers is to admit you are not to be trusted.
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.
As much as the legal investigations are hurting it now? The idea of discovering leakers isn't a bad things, but sicking external private investigators on journalists is going to get your company in hot water.
And as I'm sure other posters have or will point out, the best thing management could have done to plug the leaks at HP is to stop running a sinking ship. Start treating your employees as talent rather than resources, stop outsourcing everything to the lowest bidder, encourage the culture of knowledge and exploration that HP was known for, pull back on executive salaries whenever a round of layoffs occur, and get back to making great products rather than stamping your name on something designed and built by the lowest bidders.
The ______ Agenda
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.