When the director of the Central Intelligence Agency quits fifteen months into the job, that is news.

When that director is a retired Army general and former commander of US and International Forces in Afganistan, something is going on.

When the whole issue is due to email security and privacy … we are in unchartered waters.

The Quick Back Story

According to the Associated Press, general Petraeus had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, that began shortly after his retirement.  While showing incredibly poor judgement and opening himself up to blackmail, this act was not illegal.

Again, according to A.P., Petraeus wanted to avoid a paper trail, so he and Broadwell shared an email account.  They would create draft messages and share them with each other, then delete the message, eliminating the trail of evidence.

Then things get weird.

A Tampa, Florida socialite named Jill Kelly starts receiving anonymous, harassing, private emails and complains to the FBI.  The FBI takes the investigation seriously, and, after a series of events, Petraeus resigns.  The primary theory is that Broadwell logs into Patraeus’s other accounts – perhaps they have the same password, perhaps he leaves gmail logged in – and finds email to Kelly, creates an anonymous account, and begins the harassment campaign.  The FBI works this backwards and eventually Petraeus is forced to resign.

Whew.  With me so far?

General Petraeus’s successor in Afganistan is Marine Corps General John R. Allen, about to be appointed to the position of supreme allied commander Europe … except the FBI found a bunch of “flirtatious” emails from him to Kelly as well, and his appointment is on hold.  (The New York Times referred to it as “hundreds of emails“.)

Now let’s talk about IT policy.

Implications on 21st Century Technology

When known for some time that What Happens In Vegas is unlikely to stay there – thanks to the smart phone, everyone has a camera and an internet connection.

One thing this new wave of technology gives us is the ability to melt down incredibly quickly.  Anthony Weiner, for example, sent an explicit photo and some inappropriate emails, and his political career was over.

Yes, Weiner was doing … other things, the real things that killed his career.  Twitter and the iPhone didn’t do him in, but they made it incredibly easy to create evidence in seconds – where a polaroid and a hand-carried letter might not.

A second surprise around the Petraeus scandal is the expectation of privacy.  By creating an anonymous account, our email harasser expected anonymity   Once the FBI got involved, all pretense of that was gone.  If anything you do online is trackable to an IP address, you might do well to consider it public.

There is at least one more unexpected twist to the story, because the investigation went wherever it found evidence.  By contacting the FBI, and giving them access to her computer, Kelly allowed the FBI to get access to all her email – including the records of General Allen.

Conclusions

I have no easy answers; records you thought you deleted have a way of showing up in system caches.

Except, perhaps, that this situation might be a good chance to take a look at your company’s policies about internet use, separation of personal and work email, about information retention and lifecycle management, or as a good story to use to encourage people into right behavior.

Or, perhaps, just perhaps, the Petraeus Principle will come to be about how to deal with failure with integrity – by admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for our actions.

I’ve been tracking the progress of HP, the company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, trying to deconstruct and demystify some of it’s strategic moves.

And, I have to admit, this one threw me for a loop.

Four days ago, Hewlett-Packard fired it’s CEO, Leo Apotheker, after just ten months on the job, and announced they were hiring Meg Whitman as his replacement.

And then it gets weird.

How did we get there?

In previous articles, I’ve talked about HP’s strategy — or, at least, one strategy that would lead to the decisions they are making.  This includes the strategy, or apparent, strategy, to dump the personal computer.

Why dump the PC?  Because over time, technologie tend to standardize.  When standards start to sink in, we say the industry is maturing – which tends to lead to less profit for each individual sale.  Because the profit is less per unit, a few large companies tend to emerge; smaller companies are either purchased or simply go out of business because the margins are too slim.   Consider Michael Porter’s famous Industry Maturity Model:

The Product Life Cycle

Now there’s no promise that things will always go forward this way, but think about the buggy whip, the automobile form 1920-1950, big box retail and paper products have all gone through a process of growth, maturity, and decline.

Don’t think so?

A major sub-plot of the network television show The Office is based on the idea the decline in the traditional, intermediated paper industry.

Now technologies don’t just “go away”; they are replaced.  The horse-drawn carriage was replaced by the automobile; CompUSA, Borders, and Circuit City were replaced by web-based retail.

Because people willing to pay a premium are only willing to pay it for the “new hotness”, the personal computer was replaced by the laptop — and the laptop by new devices.

Yes, new devices.  The tablet, the smart phone, the iPod touch.  People will pay extra for these devices, and if HP could get into the industry, they could make a fair bit of money.

… except, as we know, they couldn’t, and CEO Leo Apotheker pulled them out of the tablet race, rather then throw more money at a losing product.  In the same vein, he made an effort to sell HP’s PC unit while purchasing software companies.

If you think the new growth will be in software companies, this actually makes sense.

Then the board fired him.

That much, I get.  Apotheker was the former CEO of SAP — he’s a software guy.  His moves tended to change the foundational DNA of HP, to make it more like a software company.  Skittish, pushed from it’s core competencies, paying too much for one type of company while selling others for too little, the HP board made a tough choice.

Like I said, I get it.

The thing is who they replaced Apotheker with Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay.

Certainly, Whitman did some impressive things with eBay.  She grew the company from $100 million in revenue to over eight billion in 2008.

The thing is Whitman’s experience – from eBay, Disney, Stride Rite, and FTD, Whitman’s entire work experience is in consumer-marketed products.

So the HP board fired a business software ‘outsider’, who didn’t get HP’s culture and tried to turn it into a software company … and hired a personal software ‘outsider.’

What is going on here?

At this point, I see Meg Whitman bringing a few things to the table:

(1) She is a rock star CEO.  While that might not help HP, say, sell products people actually want, it might help HP sell a bit of stock on Wall Street.  More importantly,

(2) Whitman’s background is in personal (“consumer”) technology, and American IT is becoming increasingly commercialized.

At some point, white-collar workers stopped expecting the company to provide them a good cell phone, and went out and bought their own blackberry or iPhone.  Likewise, they are buying their own iPads right now, creating a little business/producitivity/personal-product niche — small products purchased by individuals for use at home and work.

Apple has that market about sewn up, and there is a chance that some of Whitman’s experience could be helpful in it’s pursuit.

Notice I said a chance.  I honestly am not sure what HP’s board is on about.  At this point, history will tell.

In the mean time, we folks in IT have to figure out not only what brand of PC’s to buy, but how to deal with the executive that wants to check his work email on his personal computer over an unencrypted wireless network from Panera Bread Company.

Keep it tuned here.

Oh boy, do we have things to talk about.