Business competition
Defense of Business Ethics and honesty In Competition
In early September, news broke of the deal by Oracle’s Mark Hard as its new chairman, replacing Charles Phillips, who had been embroiled in a scandal of sex. So far, so corporate movement might seem quite natural, but for a couple of important nuances: Hard was president of Hewlett Packard until a month before his appointment, a company from which he also issues a lover.
With the level of information available at that time, most of the comments regarding the appointment of Mark Hard, including my own, focused on how fresh were his departure from HP and how curious it was that there had been poured by “inflating cost notes.” That is, we simply discuss these issues in the early hours do not manage to see the full depth of the matter, beyond hinting if he was all orchestrated to make the jump to free competition protection clauses. A critical perspective output Hard, HP went almost unnoticed.
Now, with more information available and after the Council has criticized the administration for firing Hard HP by a little thing and to avoid a public relations problem, start out the voices that defend the Council’s decision and strongly criticize the Mark Herd’s attitude (and, therefore, that of Larry Ellison to the contract). This is the case of Ben Horowitz, founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who argues in his blog the Board of HP because it believes that if the CEO of a large publicly traded corporation falsified expense reports and contracts to get by one getaways with an ex-porn star on account of the company, undermines credibility of the accounts and management reports submitted by the company and signed by the same CEO. He is right. Read the rest of this entry »