Page 96 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ACT WITH INTEGRITY

Pfeiffer’s work and attitude at IBM were exemplary, and it wasn’t long
before she was promoted to vice president of communications and
government relations, a job in which she fully absorbed and promoted the
company’s culture of authenticity and honor. She went on to become an
independent management consultant for many companies, including RCA,
and was offered a chance to serve as President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of
commerce, an opportunity she respectfully declined so that she could
spend more time with her new husband and her ten stepchildren and also
focus on her health—she was recovering from thyroid cancer at the time.
Thus, in 1978, when Pfeiffer was appointed chairman of the NBC television
network and became the highest-paid woman executive in America, one
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of the first people with whom she shared the happy news was John Gard-
ner. “I’ve always been very fortunate in my life to be surrounded by good
people who encouraged me,” Pfeiffer said. “John Gardner was one those,
and he was just thrilled when I got that job at NBC.”
But three weeks later, Pfeiffer called Gardner to report that something
was dreadfully wrong at her new post: She apparently was sitting squarely
in the middle of a major scandal. “I hadn’t been on the job a month when
I got a phone call with three United States attorneys on the line, and they
told me that we had some serious problems with a part of the business not
managing funds correctly and that we were under investigation,” Pfeiffer
recalled. “I remember talking to John Gardner about it, and I said, ‘John,
you won’t believe what’s happening with this wonderful assignment that
you were so thrilled with!’”
While Pfeiffer cannot offer many details of what transpired next—
she is constrained by settlement agreements she signed nearly thirty years
ago—I was able to use what little information she provided, along with
news archives, to piece the story together. Pfeiffer said the problem first
came to light when someone with knowledge of the wrongdoing contacted
U.S. attorneys from California, Washington, D.C., and New York to blow
the whistle on what a New York Times reporter later would call “a seamy
scandal involving hundreds of thousands of dollars in padded expense
accounts and embezzled NBC funds” in one of the network’s divisions.
22

21 “RCA chief Pfeiffer is best-paid woman exec,” Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1979, p. 14.
22 “Television Enters the 80s,” New York Times, August 19, 1979.

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