Robert Moffat was IBM's senior vice president for technology who recently pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail for insider trading. This article covers various aspects of his life, how he became involved with Danielle Chiesi, a consultant at New Castle Funds and how that ultimately led to his downfall. According to the article Moffat would be the last person anyone expected to be caught up in a scandal, let alone a crime. He had a lot of money, a great family and was considered to be a candidate to succeed Samuel Palmisano, IBM's CEO. His main attributes were loyalty, inhuman work habits, and the mental bandwidth of an orchestra conductor. It is ironic that everyone describes Moffat as a very loyal and trusted individual when in reality he did just the opposite to both IBM ( he had worked at IBM for over 30 years) and his family. He was also always considered very intelligent, Moffat was able to develop many ingenious systems for IBM's operations. The first question that comes to mind is how does such a loyal and intelligent man get involved in this? Although he presented many leadership qualities, what leadership qualities is he lacking? Please share your comments on this case.
Thank you,
Liz Ramirez
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/06/news/companies/ibm_insider_trading.fortune/
I personally feel that leaders such as Moffat should be the most feared force in Corporate America. These are the leaders that anyone and everyone trusts. While everyone is looking the other way the brick wall has already crumbled. Moffat was a stand up leader but the moral decision he made to take part of insider trading was made on his own free will. He had every chance and willing chose to make the wrong choice.
ReplyDeleteDrew Alfrey
I agree with Drew's opinion on Moffat. It is really scary to think that people place so much trust into someone and after years of devotion to IBM, Moffat is so willing to just throw it away. He was placed in multiple ethical dilemma's when it came to interacting with Danielle Chiesi and he made the wrong choice every time from what I gather in the article.
ReplyDeleteEven more scary is the way that Danielle Cheisi worked her way into many positions that would put her close to some of the most powerful men in the fortune 500 scene. From what is in the article, it looks like she had a plan to get close to all these men from the beginning. I am surprised by the simple fact that some of the most intelligent men in the country could not see through her mirage and instead fell for allure and allowed her to get them caught up in a huge scandal. I would say that one of Moffat's flaws then would have to be deemed his own awareness of his environment.
Justin Fisher
I definitely agree, people saw him as a great leader and most would say he had the 5 major leadership traits (intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity and sociability). It is disappointing to see that at one time Moffat did posses these leadership traits and due to an outside influence (Cheisi) lost sense of his leadership skills. Integrity is the quality of honesty and trustworthiness and although people thought Moffat was trustworthy he clearly was the opposite towards the end of his career. He was deceptive to all of those around him and lost all of their trust and respect. The most unfortunate part like Justin mentioned is the fact that although he was intelligent and had built himself up from the very bottom though his verbal and perceptual ability he was not intelligent enough to see through Cheisi's scheme.
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