Grade school idea applied to Business, perhaps?

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Sunday October 29, 2006

Today, I led a session at the WITI conference on Spirituality & Business.

We worked on 3 case studies: one with the Radioshack CEO who lied about his education as an example of classic misrepresentation, one about the pre-texting situation at HP which was about wrong methods/right goal, and then another about the options issues Greg Reyes was involved with. I wanted people to consider that each of these people didn’t intend to do wrong but they had a particular lens through which those decisions they made, made sense. But they didn’t imagine other options or implications.

So all that is context.

One remarkable lady suggested this as an alternative way that HP’s Dunn could have addressed the board dysfunction. What if you make the group responsible for the actions of the individuals. In grade school, she said, entire classes are punished when 1 kid misbehaves. That way, peer pressure causes the entire performance of the team to rise. If you applied the same story to HP, you could have said until the leaking stopped, no stock options would be granted. Some thing that reinforced they were in it together and they had to solve it.

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Leadership, Authentic, HP, Business, Ethics