Jonathan's
blog about making donations to the China earthquake relief effort seems to
have seeded the usual maelstrom of comments. Roughly, they fall into three
categories: (1) thank you; (2) why are you blogging about charitable giving
when you should be fixing Sun; and (3) why are people criticizing an act
of charity at a time of immense disruption and displacement with a more
immense human cost?
The comments of the second type are yet another case of mis-applying the law of the excluded middle. For some reason, it appears that Jonathan cannot do anything other than think about running Sun; any act on a personal level must somehow detract from his time invested in being CEO. And that's both the fallacy and the danger in the assumption: CEO does not stand for "Chief Either Or." It's possible to run a company with a social agenda and a slice of humanity. The two are not mutually exclusive, it's not an either-or proposition. There are executives for whom execution is of singular and paramount importance.
I wouldn't work for one of them.
So well put. I wouldn't either.
Posted by Sin-Yaw Wang on May 30, 2008 at 05:55 AM EDT #
I know this is not what you mean, Hal, nor is it what I think Jonathan means,
but there are some people out there with the attitude,
"if you don't give to my favorite charity, you are not worthy of being a colleague of mine."
It is a sad truth.
Posted by Carolyn on June 01, 2008 at 01:21 PM EDT #