Martin. I even got magellan to agree with this one: a $100 contribution is qualitatively different than a $1000 contribution. Federal law allows contributions of up to $200 to a candidate to be given without public disclosure. I think that’s about right, though arguably you could place the threshold in the $50 to $500 range.
But at $1000 you are buying whole radio ads. You want to do that? Fine. But you shouldn’t be able to do that without owning it. A $50-$100 contribution is different in my view.
First of all, Eich resigned because he knew he was causing a shitstorm. Mozilla tried to keep him in a different capacity, but he refused. There were other issues as well. One of the board members of Mozilla resigned rather than having to appoint him to the position, and somehow I doubt whether LGBT was the only issue. Mozilla has an open culture and its programmers were criticizing the big guy.
Furthermore, CEO is truly a different job. Especially so at Mozilla. Mozilla has a $300 million budget, mostly from payments by Google. They have thousands of volunteer programmers that they have to suck up to. It’s a non-profit company in transition: they are trying to produce a mobile platform which involves negotiation with cell phone companies. There were doubts whether Eich had the proper social skills.
I’m guessing/speculating that Eich was 100% committed to open source but not 100% committed to Mozilla. Because if he was committed he would have chalked up the 2008 contribution to a youthful discretion or some such nonsense rather than insisting that he can keep his mysterious beliefs to himself. I don’t think that’s good enough from the perspective of key stakeholders: plenty of the volunteer programmer are gay or some are plagued by nerdish insecurities. Either way, there are lots of uses for their time.
Foxes know a lot about lots of things while hedgehogs know one big thing. CEOs need to be hedgehogs and foxes at the same time. Numbers guys need to know how to chat with suppliers. Glad-handlers need to read spreadsheets. Tough guys need to create an environment that attracts top talent and diplomats need to master boardroom talk. It’s a special job. I suspect Eich is disappointed or even crushed, but his future opportunities remain golden.
First of all, all of the following applies only to the CEO. The VPs can dodge the bullet.
Is Jerry McPastor causing a shitstorm with his employees, customers and suppliers? Does he acknowledge that? Is he fighting to keep his job? Because Jerry has a special thing he can appeal to: his religion. Nobody thinks that Southern Baptists are a stalking horse for pre-conceived beliefs: this isn’t a Kansas hate group posing as a church. Religious conscience has a long tradition in US life.
So does political participation. But less so. We’re discussing tradeoffs here. But imagine that McPastor spends all of Sunday and Wednesday evenings in prayer, Saturdays with family and its eating into his schedule. There are plenty of circumstances where we can imagine that he would have to choose between his faith and Mammon. Tradeoffs make the situation disturbing but not especially unusual.
Of course. And I’m free to resent you for it and inform you that you are not winning any points from me for your cause. Which I just did.
Anyway, one is not like the other. I strongly believe one should be able to have and express political opinions without it having and adverse or beneficial impact on ones personal life. And I’d feel the same if a conservative employee fired someone for having opinions he disagreed with. I have previously hired people whom I knew to be communists. We still have to live together despite our political disagreements. These are two spheres that should be kept separate.
Let’s say that his single donation is reflective of his religious beliefs. He doesn’t speak in tongues or even go to church every Sunday, but his sincerely held beliefs are traditional Christian beliefs that lead him to oppose SSM. Is there a difference? Must a person profess a certain denomination to be protected under civil rights laws?
And I’m free to wonder why anybody is supposed to care that you resent them. People are fighting for what they see as fundamental rights and they’re supposed to give a shit that you think they’re impolite?
Civil rights laws cover religious beliefs. They do not cover donations to political campaigns. It’s that simple.
That would be nice. But the fact is becoming a Klansman isn’t a great career move and if that’s in your past, you better renounce it if you want to move past a certain ceiling. In the real world.
On top of that, the CEO job is special; giving your stakeholders cold feet is something that the Board of Directors has to care about if they are to perform their fiduciary responsibilities. I concede that this stuff isn’t especially fair at some level. Tradeoffs. And a good reason for anti-discrimination law.
Apple - famous or infamous for having had Jobs as its face and now a much discussed question if Tim Cook can deliver in a post Jobs era.
Google - Larry Page as CEO and Sergey Brin as co-founder represent the company.
Tesla - Elon Musk is the face for it and his other ventures.
Facebook - Zuckerberg.
Microsoft’s face was without question Bill Gates while he was its head and Steve Ballmer was its face until recently. I suspect Nadella, the new CEO, will set a very distinct tone as its new face.
Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings is perhaps less known by many, but his being able to put a heartfelt apologic face out there after their disastrous DVD/streaming charge structure fiasco, and to follow it up in action, possibly saved the company.
Disney’s CEO also represents the company and the persona of Igar spoke to a different era than did Eisner.
These are not exactly in Mozilla’s space but what is? Mozilla though moreso needs a CEO who can serve as its face to its employees, the programmers who assist them for no pay, and their customers. It functions and aspires to be not so much a top down structure as a community dedicated towards a shared cause. Programmers work on creating a better product for Mozilla for no pay as part of serving that cause. Its ethos as marketed anyway is promoting openess. The CEO has to embody and articulate that message. His/her using that bully pulpit to sell that shared vision and to keep everyone signed on to it (especially as the vision adapts beyond a browser in changing tech world) is possibly the most important aspect of that job, even more than for most other CEOs.
A CEO who endorses (speaking with his pocketbook) policies that a now majority (especially within their target demographics) percieve as oppressive, who states that his personal beliefs being in opposition to the values of the corporation and its community of supporters is of no concern, will have a hard time selling that particular vision and achieving continued buy-in.
That is not lynching or aiming to destroy a career (I doubt anyone would have objected to his continuing in a technical capacity; he chose not to) - it is a very basic rational business decision.
This much is true–and also works the other way. If a CEO comes out against-SSM but his customers don’t care, public outcry will have little impact. Dan Cathy actually got promoted after the Chick-fil-A boycott, and Chick-fil-A actually had banner sales the past few years and is now the #1 chicken franchise in America in terms of revenue (ousting KFC from its long held throne, and with only about 45% as many stores as KFC.) It helps that Cathy’s family owns Chick-fil-A and it’s a closely held private company; but I assume if the boycotts had actually really hurt their business Cathy’s dad probably would have shuffled him away somewhere and not promoted him.
I can agree with the idea that $100 is materially different than $1000. I have much more of a problem with the story about the woman who was the restaurant manager of her family owned restaurant who came to work one day to basically a street protest that devolved into a riot. Then her family basically had to fire her so they could stay in business. That just seems too petty, too focused at a private citizen, and too overblown and basically unjust for what she did. I feel much worse for her than I do Eich. (As much as anyone can “feel” for people they don’t know at all.)
I’m not sure I agree with the principle that Eich’s donation should be public because he has more money, though.
We debated the $100 donation on this board. I see that as power politics trumping niceties. Not wonderful IMHO. Understandable, perhaps predictable. Personally, I think we’re at another moment in history. Anyway, the problem was that her state had disclosure laws at lower thresholds (some are well under $50, by the way, which seems kind of silly to me).
I’m not saying Eich’s donation should be public because he has more money. I’m saying anybody’s donation of $1000 should be public. It simply exerts disproportionate influence to be made anonymously. My personal comfort zone is in the $100-$300 range. I can handle $50-$500. Anything above that should be a matter of public record and amounts below that should really be blown off.
That said, if I learned somebody made a $20 contribution to the Klan, I would certainly think less of them. I’d feel uneasy buying their pizza or pastry. I confess I’d probably go elsewhere. Sorta depends: if I liked a deli owner who had toxic politics, I might have enough respect for them to engage in conversation before going away. Dunno.
My problem with the scenario is, his political ‘opinion’ does cause adverse impact to my (and thousands upon thousands) of other people.
I’ve worked side by side with people that I know would support prop 8, as would most of my family. To my knowledge, they never financially supported it or that would have made it impossible for us to live together. It’s not about political disagreement, it’s about protecting my family.
While I do not disagree with your point, and the fact that being anti-SSM had less impact on CFA than it would on a Mozilla, I do need to make one correction to the spin out there that there was no impact on Chick-Fil-A. Chick-Fil-A’s growth trajectory had been 8.6% in 2009, 11% in 2010, 13% in 2011, 14% in 2012. They were on a tear and reasonably should have expected 15% plus growth. They had plans to expand outside of their core regions. In 2013, coincident with the outcry over the homophobic opinions expressed, even Chick-Fil-A had a flattening of their growth. Instead of 15% plus that should have been expected they grew less than 10%, theor lowest growth rate in years. Still enough to pass by the longtime faltering KFC-America brand, but a miss nevertheless. The fact that even Chick-Fil-A, located mostly in Red states and conservative areas, with an image that is all about what gets called Christian family values (not openess), had their growth slowed by being associated with intolerance to gays, was quite telling.
In their case however slowed growth is still more money than most could know what to do with and the negative blowback from a highly visible retreat would cost them as well, possibly more. Plus I think they really do operate with the belief that what matters most is service to what they believe is the word of God and are willing to sacrifice some profit in service of their beliefs.
You’re probably right. Likewise, a company firing their CEO for being a racist wouldn’t get the same reaction as a company firing their CEO for not being racist enough. In both cases, I’d say that’s as it should be.
[ul]
[li] Mozilla’s corporate values (as stated, and practiced) are in direct contradiction to Eich’s personally stated beliefs. He’s repeatedly stated he has no intention to change Mozillla’s practice or policy in that regard. In other words, he planned to leave his personal beliefs “at the door” so to speak.[/ul][/li][/quote]
Sorta, but he wasn’t all that clear on it. He avoided actually mentioning LGBT people, and just spoke in generalities. He tried to dance around the issue.
[quote]
[ul][li] Eich’s beliefs were expressed 8 years ago, with no sign that e continues to support those actions. True, he hasn’t repudiated his personal beliefs, only stated he plans to keep them away from Mozilla.[/ul][/li][/quote]
You just gave the sign. He was in a position where not repudiating his beliefs would hurt him, and he didn’t do it. That’s practically proof that he continues to support the actions.
He couldn’t have done much, but he did have plenty of time to take a token action to demonstrate his sincerity.
I’m someone who thought the whole OKCupid thing was overblown. I actually gave the guy the benefit of the doubt that he would keep his politics out of his job. I didn’t want the guy fired. I actually commented such in the comments section on some news comment.
But I also think he needed to do something to convince people that he would not let his personal views inform the company. By never explicitly saying he would do what he could to make sure Mozilla supported the LGBT community as it had in the past, I think he hung himself.
He did actually perform a small action that indicated how he was going to do things. He put his own personal beliefs in front of trying defuse a situation that was harming his company.
Nope, but you’re perfectly free to cull publicly-available info on who might have contributed to pro-LGBT political campaigns and exercise your First Amendment right to criticize them for it and suggest they should be fired or whatnot.
That’s the current state of the law, at least.
Eh, actually the controversy started in 2011 and carried over into 2012. So your numbers don’t really suggest what you believe they suggest. Further they attempt to simplify something complex, like sales growth at a huge restaurant chain. I think it’s notable that they overtook an entrenched competitor with national reach in 2013, in terms of revenue, while not even having nearly the same geographic reach.
of course someone can oppose SSM and still be a decent human being. People are multifaceted and we all have some good and bad. The opposition against SSM is generational, religious and imbedded through indoctrination. That isn’t easy to shake. Someone could be very kind and generous in other facets of their life, do volunteer work in soup kitchens and still oppose SSM. People shouldn’t be labeled as “bad people” because they are wrong on a certain issue.
Depending on the issue, being determinedly wrong about it can indicate irrational, willfully-spiteful thought processes. I’m okay with calling someone a “bad person” if they gleefully discard one of the facets that makes a person (well, a human) - the ability to think and reason.
Which sounds to me like simplifying something complex, long term sales growth and expansion …
Notable as part of long term growth trends over more than a decade for both companies, most significantly KFC flat to retreating in America for a long time while growing in China and CFA having been on a fairly consistent tear for at least as long, yes. But those long term trends had nothing to do with the controversy. All that you can attach to the controversy is what happened to CFA’s growth trajectory since the controversy got national publicity.
But this is a digression and if we want to discuss it more probably we should do it in that past thread. As matters to this thread I did not disagree with the point you were attempting to illustrate: how a CEO face matters and how much is different for different companies.
