There's less weakness in admitting a failure honestly, retreating and regrouping, than in powering through when knowing oneself unprepared.
-- brion On Mar 4, 2016 7:07 PM, "MZMcBride" z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Alice Wiegand wrote:
We know that our C-level team is doing a great job in managing the day-to-day-operations and they all have a deep understandning of our culture, challenges and needs. Who, if not them, knows better what is best for the organization in this moment. The Board is not best suited to make a decision about the interim which can quickly be established and accepted in this situation.
Therefor the board empowers the entire C-level-team to come up with a solution for the interim question. We leave it up to them how that decisions looks like. We trust them to think traditional or outside of the box as it fits to our organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. The C-level-team needs some time to deliberate and decide. They will present their result to the board which has to vote on it. We plan to finalize until the end of next week.
Current Wikimedia Foundation "C-levels" based on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors:
- Lila Tretikov, Executive Director
- Wes Moran, Vice President of Product
- [vacant], Chief Technology Officer
- Maggie Dennis, Senior Director of Community Engagement (Interim)
- Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer
- Geoff Brigham, General Counsel
- Katherine Maher, Chief Communications Officer
- Jaime Villagomez, Chief Financial Officer
- Joady Lohr, Vice President of Human Resources (Interim)
Does the "C-level team" in this context include Lila and/or the interims?
My vote is for Geoff Brigham. There's precedent for the General Counsel to be interim Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, of course. And Geoff has been around long enough and is trusted to be a good steward of the Wikimedia Foundation. I don't think an outsider would be a good idea.
I don't see it as a sign of strength to abdicate your responsibility in this way. This action makes the Board of Trustees, already perceived as being weak, look even weaker, out-of-touch, and unprepared. You've known about general discontent with the Executive Director since November 2015 and you really weren't able, by March 2016, to figure out who would serve as interim Executive Director? This is almost derelict behavior.
I don't think anyone demands perfection from members of the Board of Trustees, but it is an actual commitment to an organization that has a very large budget and a large number of staff operating a fairly important set of Web properties. The fact that nine adults really didn't think through the consequences of "what comes next after the current Executive Director?" in order to come prepared with an answer to the most obvious question ("who will be the interim?") is pretty embarrassing and sad.
MZMcBride
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