Leadership Leader
The announcement this month of Kendra Scott as the 2017 national winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year caused me to do two things: look into what this CEO and founder of Kendra Scott LLC was all about, and buy some jewelry while I was at it.
So, what’s the secret sauce behind Kendra Scott LLC? Much of it has been remaining true to its core values of “family, fashion, and philanthropy.” It’s not just a family-friendly headquarters in Austin, but Scott wants her employees to treat each other like family. Corny sounding, maybe, but all of the employees I talked to while buying my first piece of Kendra Scott jewelry certainly reflected that attitude.
She also makes new market decisions based on online and wholesale purchases. Yep, she goes where the customers are and directly communicates with customers about what they like – and dislike – about her designs. And in the philanthropy department, the company gave over $3.5 million and 75,000 pieces of jewelry to charities last year and is on track to hit the $5 million mark this year.
Finally, Scott knows she didn’t get where she is on her own and readily gives credit to the several mentors she’s had over the years. “I think for entrepreneurs to ask for help is not a sign of weakness; it’s an incredible sign of strength.”
Leadership Milquetoast
That plan included some new company core values, which Khosrowshahi calls “cultural norms,” and we found a couple of the new values to be noteworthy: “We are customer obsessed. We work tirelessly to earn our customers’ trust…” and “We do the right thing. Period.”
As you might remember, there have been more than a few notable data breaches made public recently, (think Equifax, Yahoo, the Democratic Party, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the National Security Agency) and they all had one thing in common: the organizations and their leaders dragged their feet in letting those individuals whose data might have been compromised in on the secret. Unless he’s been living under a rock or in a technology-free zone for the past several years, Khosrowshahi appears to be a slow learner.
It sounded plausible when Khosrowshahi claimed just last week that he’d only recently found out about Uber’s 2016 hack and subsequent cover up. And it even sounded good when he said, “None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it.”
Recently | adverb: during a recent period of time; lately.
We acknowledge that word means different things to different people, but in our view, two months was too long to wait to let Uber users know about the breach. Even Equifax only took six weeks, and look at the flak they took.
“Come on,” you say. “It was only email addresses, passwords and PINs.” That’s not the point. Until the Wall Street Journal broke the story last week, Uber hadn’t let anyone know about the breach except a Japanese conglomerate that was considering a large investment. In fact, Uber has yet to let any of the 57 million account holders know if their data might have been compromised. If you might be one of them, don’t worry, because Uber says, “We are monitoring the affected accounts and have flagged them for additional fraud protection.”
In other words, “Trust me.”
Well, Dara, saying the right things is not the same thing as doing the right things. You could learn from the online image sharing community, Imgur, CEO Alan Schaaf, who took only 25 hours to go from notification on Thanksgiving Day to press advisory. (Can’t give him too many pats on the back, though, since it was a 2014 hack.)
