MOZILLA, the outfit behind the Firefox
web browser and other software, has just lost its chief executive, Brendan Eich
(pictured), who resigned on April 3rd after spending little more than a week in
the job. His departure raises thorny questions about where lines should be
drawn between leaders’personal beliefs and their corporate
roles.
Mr
Eich quit after a controversy blew up about his views on gay marriage. In 2008
he gave $1,000 to a campaign that supported Proposition 8, a California ballot
measure banning same-sex marriage in the state. The measure passed but was
subject to legal challenges. Prop 8's supporters went all the way to the
federal Supreme Court, which last year dismissed their appeal, thus allowing
gay marriage in California to go ahead. When Mr Eich's
support for the proposition became public a couple of years ago, it provoked an
outcry in the Twittersphere, but this eventually died down. Mr Eich argued that
Mozilla should stay focused on its mission and not allow differences of
personal opinion to cloud its operations.
Advertisement
His
elevation last month from chief technology officer to the top job at Mozilla
rekindled the furore. Some Mozilla employees upset with Mr Eich's
views on gay marriage called on him to step down. To make matters worse from
Mozilla's perspective, OkCupid, a dating site, this week began
sending out a message to visitors coming to it via Firefox that called on them
to use an alternative browswer because of Mr Eich's public stance against gay
marriage.
Faced
with all this, Mr Eich threw in the towel. In a blog post about his departure,
Mozilla's executive chairwoman, Mitchell Baker, admitted that
the former chief executive's beliefs had created
a dilemma for the company.“Mozilla believes both
in equality and freedom of speech,”she wrote.“Equality
is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need to have free speech to fight
for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.”
Plenty
of folk have wondered out loud why Mr Eich's views on gay
marriage had anything to do with his ability to lead an organisation that makes
software. After all, he seemed eminently suited to the job given his track
record as a co-founder of Mozilla and the man behind JavaScript, a very popular
programming language.
However,
the dilemma that Ms Baker refers to is real. Mozilla isn't
a typical company. It is more of a community organisation that is strongly
committed to so-called "open-source software",
which is developed collaboratively and then licensed for use in such a way that
it can be studied and changed easily by others. The outfit also campaigns
actively to keep the internet open in the face of efforts by a few giant tech
companies such as Google and Facebook to carve it up into fiefdoms that they
rule over.
So
Mozilla is a bizarre beast in the world of tech: part business and part
internet missionary. It also relies heavily on the goodwill of programmers and
others to support its efforts. To woo them, the outfit has stressed that it is
an open and inclusive workplace. In her blog post Ms Baker refers to the fact
that Mozilla “prides itself on being held to a different standard”as an organisation.
By
appointing Mr Eich to the top job, Mozilla's board members must
have known they were risking a backlash. They only needed to consider the
experience of Chick-fil-A, an American fast-food chain whose boss, Dan Cathy,
had also publicly opposed gay marriage. Mr Cathy recently said he regretted
taking a public stance on the issue after his firm was hit by a consumer
boycott.
Some
critics say that at a time when Mozilla is struggling to adapt its wares to a
world dominated by smartphones and other mobile devices, it can ill-afford to
lose a talented techie like Mr Eich. And they argue that forcing a boss to
resign on the basis of his beliefs is a dangerous precedent that smacks of
political correctness gone mad.
But
a chief executive has to be able to get people to follow him and engender
confidence in the broader marketplace. The schism Mr Eich's
appointment caused within Mozilla risked damaging its ability to pursue its
mission. And OKCupid's decision to call on Firefox users to switch to other
web browsers is evidence that the fallout was starting to have a real impact on
Mozilla's operations.
All
this raises the question of why Ms Baker did not anticipate the impact that Mr
Eich's promotion would have. In her blog post, she trumpets
the“diversity and inclusiveness”of Mozilla's workforce, yet admits at the same time that the
board failed "to listen, to engage and to be guided by our community".
We should applaud her belated frankness, but hard questions should be asked of
her own leadership in this sad saga.
From
The Economist
No comments:
Post a Comment