Page 98 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ACT WITH INTEGRITY

This was not the kind of work Pfeiffer thought she would be doing at
NBC. She sought advice from John Gardner and others and came to the
conclusion that she had three choices. She could go along with the way
things were and stop only the most obvious violations, doing just enough to
make the SEC back off; she could quit NBC and find a less chaotic place
to work; or she could do her job. “I came from a world where if you had
these problems, you got to the bottom of it and fixed them,” Pfeiffer
explained. “It was an interesting moment to have the chance to see if I’m
the kind of person who can work my way through or if I’m the kind of
person who will just say ‘to heck with it’ and quit. I chose to do my job,
because it was the right thing to do.”
Without taking the time to seek permission from the board or the
leadership of RCA, NBC’s parent company at that time, Pfeiffer swiftly
brought in outsiders—an independent auditing company with 228 account-
26
ants and an accomplished corporate crisis manager and lawyer, Victor
Palmieri—to unravel the tangled web of issues at the network. “I didn’t
ask permission to do this because I assumed I was supposed to do it,” Pfeif-
fer said. According to Time magazine, to preserve potential evidence, inves-
tigators had a carpenter close off the office of Vice President Stephen
Weston, the unit managers’ supervisor. When the investigative team
demanded typeface samples from every unit manager’s typewriter, one
manager’s equipment mysteriously vanished after an inexplicable late-night fire
in his office. Eighteen of the company’s fifty-five unit managers, including their
supervisor, Weston, ultimately were fired. 27
Pfeiffer’s take-no-prisoners approach to exposing corruption at NBC
caused her to butt heads with more than a few people and made her the
brunt of many cruel jokes. At a staff meeting, NBC vice chairman Richard
Salant reportedly said it looked as if Pfeiffer “sent in the whole damned
Marines to rescue a cat.” Disgruntled workers began calling Pfeiffer Saint
28
Jane and Attila the Nun, referring to the time she spent in a convent as a
young woman, but she continued to do her work in spite of the disapproval.
Whenever the going got rough, she recalled the examples set by her White
House Fellows principal, HUD Secretary Bob Weaver, and IBM’s CEO,

26 Ibid.
27 “Struggling to Leave the Cellar,” Time, May 14, 1979.
28 “Hell No, I Won’t Go,” TIME, 21 July 1980.

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