Tom,

Thanks for the good email.

It's important to learn from mistakes, but admitting mistakes does not absolve someone from accountability. When people are being paid to do something right or to achieve a certain outcome, and that doesn't happen or it happens late, it's sometimes a very good and appropriate thing to consider replacing them for the sake of the organization and the program.

In the case of IEP, the consultant said that firing people would have been "premature". I'm not sure that I would have reached the same conclusion, and I think if I had been on WMF's board at the time that this report was released, I might have had things to say about holding individual employees accountable. But in the here and now, I am mostly interested in making sure that lessons from this program are deeply embedded into the institutional memory of WMF throughout the organization and on a long-term basis.

Pine