The Culture of Evasion 122
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."
Learning from the top (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like George Bush and his denial of responsibility for torture being done in the name of America. When we let our highest politicians get away with this, how can we expect our corporate leaders not to follow suit?
For the youn
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yet scandal after scandal unrolls at the whitehouse and all we see from congress is appeasement. They just made torture retroactively legal to '97. Absolutely un-fucking-beli
Re: (Score:1)
Don't kid yourself that it's only the guys with the 'R' after their name that do wrong and then do a piss-poor job of coming clean later...
Re: (Score:2)
The funniest bit of evidence is the Bible signed by Ronald Reagan that was sent to Tehran with the weapons.
Bah (Score:2)
I live in BC, Canada. My premiere (governor) was caught drinking and driving. Does that incline me, or any others, to do so? I don't think so.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe not you, but possible others. After all, if government can't follow its own rules, how can it expect anyone else to follow them?
I wonder who is leaking. (Score:2)
Someone within HP is acting against Mark Hurd, otherwise documents demonstrating his direct culpability [washingtonpost.com] would not have surfaced. It appears to me that this information seals Hurd's fate... he will probably lose his job, face criminal charges, and be the target of a class action lawsuit from the reporters from whom he fraudulently obtained phone records.
The question is who is leaking and why.
HP is now the synthesis of Compaq and DEC, and there probably isn't an HP employee who doesn't know of a terminate
Re: (Score:1)
Granted, Hurd's denials are reminiscent of governmental denials. A big difference is that government, whether we like it or not, is empowered by the voting and non-voting electorate. We have, ultimately, ourselves to blame for governmental incompetence.
Neither Hurd nor Patricia Dunn, nor least of all, HP, has the legal authority to obtain phone records of journalists or even their board members. We, the people have empowered government through the police to protect us. At no time have we authorized a pri
Re: (Score:1)
Hey, if people want to blame Bush for the stupid things he's done, be my guest. I'm not going to defend him. Hell, I didn't even vote for him.
But using him as a scapegoat for everything from stubbed toes to burnt toast just makes his opponents look like morons that couldn't form a cogent argument if they tried, and are hardly the answer to the societal woes we're facing.
Game over (Score:5, Insightful)
When's he going to be fired for gross incompetence?
Re:Game over (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as there are a handful of good people at the top of an organization like HP to keep things on course the rest have a free pass to be total ass-clowns.
Re: (Score:1)
Just the "Haves" Protecting Themselves again (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [google.com]
is co-sponsoring a privacy award!!
Re:Just the "Haves" Protecting Themselves again (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The standard CEO defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The standard CEO defense - MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re:The standard CEO defense - MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The latter assertion was rejected about the same time as the former, but in Tokyo where Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the "Tiger of Malaya", was convicted and hanged for atrocities that took place in disobedience to his orders. The tribunal held that he was ultimately responsible for getting his orders carried out.
A CEO's job, like any other manager's job, is to get things
Sarbanes-Oxley? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would this seem rather onerous, if we accept their claim that they deserve hundreds of millions recompense for the positive actions of those thousands of employees? I say, you want to be compensated for their successes, then you take the responsibility for their failures as well.
Mart
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not sure it really makes that much sense that corporations act this way, but I think it is a pretty likely explanation. So they get the huge contracts because they
Re: (Score:2)
But the president can still cut a $20k check without any paperwork or even a cross-cosigner.
Re:The standard CEO defense (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to be called "Captain" that bad, and something goes wrong, you know that the buck will stop with you.
Somewhere in our slouching trek towards Gomorrah, we've gotten sufficiently post-modern that concepts such as "responsibility" are just another mutable social construct. "I dont feel guilty..."
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it depends on whether, by doing so, he produces a return in the form of higher share price or dividend payments.
If he does, then it's easy to see why they have confidence.
If you were an investor, which would you prefer -- a CEO who's a pretty cool guy, or a CEO who uses every degrading, demeaning plea, threat, and trick to increase the value of your investment?
Re: (Score:2)
What kind of silly question is that? You act as if the 'pretty cool guy' can't increase the value of your investment without acting unethically.
I don't recall that one Ollie (Score:2)
so he's bought himself a little time (Score:2)
Doing "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" from a CEO translates to "I'm guilty as hell" to me, and very probably to the state AG who is aggressively pursuing this.
As for the rest of us, is anybody planning to continue doing business with them?
Is this odd these days? (Score:2)
Isn't that what they teach in business schools these days? Falling on your sword is so old school these days when that job can be outsourced to someone else down the ladder.
Already Opened the First Envelope (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
I can see plenty of prior art on this one.... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Z.
Re:I can see plenty of prior art on this one.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The actual consequences.... (Score:1)
Forget for one moment all of the Tom DeLays, Enron-connected politicos, Jack Abramoff's and so
Gore'd (Score:2)
You've got to face the fact that very few people vote *for* a president anymore. It's the mechanism of voting against the other guy that keeps the two-parties in power. Think about how many times you've heard someone from eit
Re: (Score:1)
So I do regard a man's faithfullness to his wife to be important when deciding how to vote/who to do business with etc etc. I have yet to see the man who acts without integrity in his p
Re: (Score:2)
At best, the attempts to demonize Clinton on his absolutely horrific choice of -ho- merely brought out societys clearly hypocritical double standard concerning such events. Otherwise alo
Re: (Score:1)
The fact that many people break their vows (their word) does not make someone who does so any more honourable or trustworthy. He swore an oath to his wife, he broke it. When elected President, he
Re: (Score:2)
You really have no idea what sort of relationship they had, or whether or not they had any 'oaths' between them. They may very well have decided to keep an open relationship of sorts. Hell, their wedding vows may have included "and feel free to sleep with as many other people as you want."
The oath I'm more concerned about is
Re: (Score:1)
As I said, I don't judge integrity by party politics. Even if Bill and Hillary had an agreement that allowed adultery, he still lied under oath. I don't really understand why anyone would trust him, but I guess I could see that people might say that they trust someone else less, and consider him the best of a bad bunch. Not much of a political situation if the best you have lies under oath.
You really have no idea what
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I absolutely agree. My point was that, if the divorce rate is over 50%, we can probably safely assume that at least 25% of the population who did engage in marriage vows broke them (assuming here that *only* one party desired the divorce). I have no idea what percentage of people have gotten married at one point or another, but just a rough estimate says "quite a lot". I would
Re: (Score:1)
agreed
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.
I understand what you're saying here, I just don't think that integrity is something that can be practised part time. It's a pipe dream to think that men who are dishonest in their personal affairs will perform public duties honourably. That's why things like that are considere
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think its as simple as that. It depends on the person's priorities. There are some out there that would never compromise their professional ethics, but their personal ones are
Re: (Score:1)
Recently I was talking to my wifes grandfather. He was telling me about what he was going though looking after his ill wife and how hard it is. Then he smiled and said "But I don't mind. 60 years ago I said I'd look after her." That's the type of person I want to be, and it's the typ
Real good (Score:2)
At the time, I was pretty upset that he lied. Not because I thought he was an honorable man, but because everything was so petty. The republicans were trying their damnedest to nail him on something, anything. The best they could do was to come up with some fairly tame porn.
Now, after seeing G. W. Bush lie about everything from our reasons for invading Iraq, our treatment of prisoners, illegally spying on Americans, secret CIA pri
Re: (Score:2)
Have you ever seen the grand jury tape? Well, I have. (Due, incidentally, to it being conveniently "leaked.") They had told Clinton that they were going to investigate his involvement in Whitewater, and that's what he was prepared to testify about. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, they started asking questions about his relat
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Engineers do it to (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
The responsibilities of a CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
( 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.
Re:The responsibilities of a CEO (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Worse yet, what is someone like that doing to competitors employees? Industrial espionage is reality.
Re:The responsibilities of a CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
. .
By the way, why do you think they call them "directors"? It is the CEO who is the employee.
KFG
Key word: Responsibility. (Score:2)
He is the Chief Executive for a major company. They have in-house corporate counsel, and probably a major law firm on retainer. Consulting a lawyer takes all of fifteen minutes to set up. (According to the Newsweek article, a major law firm was involved and contacting the parties involved within hours.)
If it took three weeks for the lawyers to craft so much as a
Here's the best part (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
A matter of pride (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
If the president of a country can do it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Power corrupts.
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to The New America: We have Torture, Secret Prisons, and Domestic Spies the Nazis and Commies would have given their right tit for.
Re: (Score:2)
Basic "Bad Lieutenant" strategy.
Shame, Guilt, and Wrongdoing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] versus guilt-cultures [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Parent's admited oversimplification left out an important fact, though: that guilt and shame are not mutually exclusive. As presented, they appear to be alternatives on the same level. I suggest that they are on different levels, that the altenatives are between guilt and no guilt, between shame and no shame.
Ideally, in a perfect society, guilt should be enough. Each person ought to be
Re: (Score:1)
More on Mark Hurd (Score:2, Interesting)
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. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Tracking Software? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The press has reported this:
Regarding the false email tips, Fried and Kerstetter reported:
CIA / MI6 / NSA (Score:2)
Keyworth's guilt (Score:1)
Come on, he takes full responsibility ... (Score:2)
Mark Hurd clearly said that he takes full accountability to drive the actions to set it right [theregister.co.uk].
Carefully chosen words
Gee, that's funny. (Score:3, Interesting)
Nail these people to the wall.
Re: (Score:1)
Hysterical, even. (Score:1)
Really, what do you expect? (Score:2)
HP - You're Dead To Me (Score:1)
Get Bent!