The revelation last week that private investigators working for Hewlett-Packard had illegally accessed the phone records of company directors and journalists in search of a boardroom leak touched all manner of hot-button topics.
There was the issue of leaking itself, which is under intense scrutiny in the US these days as the Justice Department mounts an unprecedented campaign to crack down on the disclosure of information to journalists. There was the spectre of a childish feud raging at the highest levels of a major multinational corporation – something that undoubtedly happens all the time but is rarely public, and lends support to the idea that corporate governance in general is in need of a major overhaul.
There were the intimations of sexism in the way that HP chair Patricia Dunn was initially portrayed as the villain of the piece (which had its start in the dramatics surrounding the firing of Carly Fiorina, then the most powerful woman in American business.) There was the central role played by Tom Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist, whom I will never be able to separate from the autobiographical hero of the novel he recently wrote called Sex and the Single Zillionaire.
Yet what I found most remarkable in the whole thing was not simply the poor judgement of a whole bunch of people who are paid huge sums not to have poor judgement. It’s the fact that even in the aftermath, most of these people miss the point: the things you have to do to find the source of a leak are almost inevitably more damaging than the leaks themselves.
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Ms Dunn, in interviews she gave to defend herself last week, spoke of how the leaks had destroyed trust in the boardroom and that therefore something had to be done. Mr Perkins and the rest of the board, she said, agreed with that. Even a sage management observer such as Yale’s Jeff Sonnenfeld, quoted in The New York Times, endorsed the idea that it was, in Dunn’s words, “noble” to go after the leakers.
That is nonsense.
Everyone involved says they had no idea that an illegal technique called “pretexting,” – essentially pretending that you are the person under investigation in order to get a hold of that person’s private phone and e-mail records – was used in the investigation and they would not endorse that. But apparently they were only bothered by the fact that the technique is illegal in California. They somehow don’t see that leak investigations by nature destroy trust (and, not incidentally, didn’t even solve the immediate problem in this case since the source of the leak, once identified, refused to resign).
By definition, any probe into leaks is going to involve efforts to get at the private information of possible suspects. How can there be trust in an environment where everyone knows that they might be spied upon by their superiors, or even at the bidding of their supposed colleagues?
I certainly understand the frustration that leaks can create. When I was running the Industry Standard and the business was tanking, there was a lot of speculation in the business press about our fate, and especially about possible layoffs and other cutbacks. On more than one occasion we had staff meetings in which I told people as best I could what was going on, and in a matter of hours my comments were appearing on online news sites and even on TV.
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These leaks were damaging, as they increased the already extreme level of tension within the company, and undermined the confidence of the advertisers whom we needed to stick with us. I was about 90 per cent sure I knew who the culprit was, though when I confronted him directly he denied it.
Determining whether he was telling the truth would probably have been a simple matter, and not one that required any legally questionable methods. We could have looked at his e-mail – mail sent from a company computer on a company system has no presumption of privacy – and we could have looked at his company phone records. I thought about it, and talked to a few people about, and ultimately decided that I simply would not go down that road.
Sure, it would have been satisfying to catch the source of the leak, and in the short term it would have been good for the company to stop the leaks. But the price, in my view, was very high: I would have been making a statement to everyone at the company that no, we don’t trust you, and we are prepared to spy on you if we think it’s in our interest. Journalism, perhaps even more than many other endeavours, is based on trust between writers and editors and publishers, and I just didn’t see how such trust would be compatible with surreptitiously reading people’s e-mails.
I’m sure there is a lot at play in the HP situation that we don’t know about, but it seems elementary that covert investigations are not going to lead to a restoration of trust in almost any situation. Shame on the leaders of H-P, and all their high-priced lawyers and consultants, for not understanding that simple bit of ethics and common sense.