Alberto Mora–Gold Medal?
February 28, 2006 | Filed Under In the News
It’s rather early in 2006 for the GC of the year award. But whoever is currently tracking bronze or silver has a long way to go to move up on the podium.
Writer Jane Mayer of The New Yorker wrote last week about a long trip in the wilderness by Alberto Mora, the recently retired GC of the U.S. Navy. It’s worth a read (but a daunting 28 pages on my printer).
Mr. Mora questioned the Bush administration’s policy on the methods used to interrogate terror suspects. That is not really news. What is news is that Mr. Mora raised his concerns not just informally, but also in writing, and that he was not a career Navy lawyer, but a supporter of President Bush and his political appointee.
This memo argued that certain coercive interrogation practices violated the law, were tantamount to torture and could potentially expose some officials to prosecution. The article includes interview excerpts as well:
In Mora’s view, the Administration’s legal response to September 11th was flawed from the start, triggering a series of subsequent errors that were all but impossible to correct. “The determination that Geneva didn’t apply was a legal and policy mistake,” he told me. “But very few lawyers could argue to the contrary once the decision had been made.”
Mora went on, “It seemed odd to me that the actors weren’t more troubled by what they were doing.” Many Administration lawyers, he said, appeared to be unaware of history. “I wondered if they were even familiar with the Nuremberg trials—or with the laws of war, or with the Geneva conventions. They cut many of the experts on those areas out. The State Department wasn’t just on the back of the bus—it was left off the bus.”
Wherever you come out on the difficult issues raised in Mr. Mora’s memo, think about what it must have been like for him to sign and deliver it to (among others) his supervisor, William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Department of Defense (and its secretary, Mr. Rumsfeld). It puts things in perspective the next time one faces a project that has challenging policy or (corporate) political overtones.
Mr. Mora’s actions illuminate a central duty for every GC: provide counsel that the client needs, but may not want.
There’s also an excellent article on Mr. Mora in Jurist by military law expert and Professor Geoffrey Corn.
Mr. Mora is reportedly joining Wal-mart as GC for international operations. His official Navy bio is still here. But for how long?
The last word is from Ralph Waldo Emerson (via Professor Corn):
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.”
This is a Test, it is Only a Test
February 27, 2006 | Filed Under Technology, In the News
Or, look carefully at the “To” field before sending an email.
The UC Berkeley law school apparently learned this lesson the hard way when it recently sent an email to all 7, 000 applicants welcoming them to the law school.
The problem: they only typically admit 800 to get an entering class of 260.
In the process of training a new worker, the director of admissions went live with this misguided message.
Sharp applicants should have quickly hit “reply” with “Accept” in the subject field.
Sounds like a good question for a Boalt Hall Contracts 101 final exam.
Radio Shack Board Hears the Music
February 21, 2006 | Filed Under Governance, In the News
Or is it “wakes up and smells the coffee?
After a week of intense scrutiny over their “support” of CEO David J. Edmondson and his educational misstatements, the Radio Shack board yesterday announced a “mutual decision” whereby Mr. Edmondson would leave and pocket a severance. The New York Times has more. The Fort-Worth Star Telegram broke the story and is all over it.
This pressure on the board to act was increasing since the news surfaced, and really became intense last Friday when the company announced earnings and also that it was closing 400-700 stores as part of a “turnaround.”
The board had initially voiced support for Mr. Edmondson. The ex-CEO stated he had a Th.G degree from Heartland Baptist Bible College that he obtained in three years; the college checked its records, which showed him attending for two semesters. Then the board stated that it would authorize an independent investigation by outside counsel. Yesterday, mercifully, someone dialed into a clearer frequency, and reason and common sense prevailed.
Why did it have to come to this? There is an axiom that has been repeated in various forms by about 1,000 business books in the last five years. It goes something like this: lead by example.
I would wager that any Radio Shack employee who was found to have misrepresented educational experience on a signed job application would likely be terminated on the spot. How could the company ever take such an action in the future if it let Mr. Edmondson skate by on this one?
Senior executives who receive the highest pay should be held to the highest standards of integrity.
Radio Shack seems to have learned this lesson the hard way. When you go to their website this morning, this is what you find when you hit the page for executive bios:
Thank you for visiting our corporate Web site. We are currently updating and validating all of the biographical information for each of our senior executives. Please check back soon to receive this information. If this is an urgent matter, please call (817) 415-3300, option 1 and then 2 (for corporate media relations).
…
Blogging Above C-Level
February 16, 2006 | Filed Under Technology, In the News
MarketingSherpa has a interesting peek inside how a publicly-traded corporation goes about blogging at the senior officer level.
The company is Network Appliance; founder and EVP David Hitz blogs here.
It’s not exactly a fast-track process, as the idea surfaced in September 2004, and was launched a year later. Approvals from the corporate legal department and the IR group were apparently preconditions to moving forward.
The goal is to post twice a week, but sometimes work gets in the way. This could be a sign of a welcome trend in blogging: quality over quantity. This is possible when your focus is personalizing a company and a senior officer, and not monetizing eyeballs with mega-pageviews.
Dave’s Blog contains some very interesting posts, an eclectic reading list, and this morsel from the bio (click on the picture):
Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz worked as a cowboy, where he got valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle.
That may cause competitors of Network Appliance to sit up and take notice.
Update (17 Feb 06): The New York Times takes a peek inside a Wal-Mart internal blog. Straight talk always goes with low prices. BusinessWeek also examines company blogs. Corporate blogging even pries Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion loose and finds him landing at the Edelman PR firm.
You Fall Out of Your Chair…
February 15, 2006 | Filed Under Managing, Selling the GC
…Is the legal Jeopardy answer to “What happens when a leader speaks directly and with conviction?”
David Maister, the leading mangement advisor to professional service firms, has written a great speech for a new law firm managing partner. The entire work is worth reading (it would be great to hear Mr. Maister deliver it on a podcast). This part pushed me off balance:
ON CLIENTS AND WHAT THEY WANT
I believe that clients can make few distinctions on the technical capabilities of the best firms, and place great emphasis on the ability of the individual partner to enter their world, relate to them in their language, talk to them about their business. We will never succeed by being technicians alone, no matter how high our level of technical skill. Clients want us to know their business. They want us to be interested in them.
The best part of this is that it serves to shake a lawyers out of a central comfort zone: their qualifications, their firm (or legal department) attributes, and their reasons why what they know is complex and boy should people pay dearly for it.
Sometimes law firms are urged to avoid getting direct client feedback. This attitude I will never understand.
One thing about the inhouse practice is that you hear how you are doing in real time. Not always pleasant; but definitely always instructive as to what is important to the client.
David Maister entered the blogging race just this year. It looks to me like he may soon lap the field.
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