In a column today aimed at defending corporate boardrooms from additional regulation in the wake of an outrageous scandal, The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins — who never met a business story he couldn’t twist to suit his own ideology — declares that “The H-P snafu is devoid of larger meaning.”
“Larger meaning” is always, ultimately, in the eye of the beholder. Was H-P’s spying on journalists and its own board members simply a matter of poor judgment, loose ethics and a betrayal of the “H-P Way” (the original Don’t Be Evil imperative)? Maybe. But It doesn’t take a private detective firm to see that there’s a likely connection between H-P’s shame and a broader trend in U.S. corridors of power. Information is power; information is increasingly unresponsive to command; leaders — from the board room to the White House — are fighting harder, and dirtier, to try to bring it back to heel.
As access to once-inside information becomes increasingly difficult to block, institutions have a simple choice: they can accept that board members are going to talk to the press (in H-P’s case, the leaker was saying positive things!), employees are going to blog, and news and information is going to flow no matter what, so they might as well embrace transparency; or they can resort to ever more desperate ploys (cf. also: Apple) to repair cracks in informational dams and hound people who are trying to build conversational routes around those barriers.
That’s a large enough meaning for me.
[tags]hewlett-packard, wall street journal[/tags]
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