Frustration over the management at the Tech Council (TCA) of the Richard White scandal has spilled over into a festering resentment among members about the way Mr White was appointed to the council’s board in the first place.
A number of TCA members contacted by InnovationAus.com say Mr White should resign from the board immediately, saying that his actions – as revealed through mainstream media headlines in the past week – do not align with Tech Council ambitions to attract more women into the tech sector and to improve the industry’s gender equity performance.
Others have said the Tech Council leadership owes it to its members to get in front the scandal, and to remove Mr White from the board whether he wants to go or not.
But the real anger among members contacted by InnovationAus.com is reserved for the imposition of changed governance arrangements at the council that allowed Mr White to be appointed without members being allowed to vote.
In fact, at the TCA annual general meeting in June, members were not even told who had nominated to fill a vacant seat created through the resignation of founding board member Mina Radhakrishnan.
This is despite the fact that as many as 14 nominations were received by the board, including such candidates as AirTrunk founder and chief executive Robin Khuda and CyberCX founder and chief executive John Paitaridis (neither of whom were presented to the membership as candidates).
The members were simply presented with two replacement directors – WiseTech Global CEO and founder Richard White and PEXA Group chief technology officer Englantine Etiemble – and asked to approved or not approve their appointment.
One member who attended the AGM said the vote that resulted in the appointment of Mr White and Ms Etiemble was “more like a coronation”.
And now, according to the Tech Council’s new constitution, the board cannot by itself remove Mr White from its ranks even if it wanted to.
In an ultimate irony, the constitution rules that a director can only be removed through a resolution of the members, the same members who were not consulted in the first place.
Richard White has been the subject of salacious news stories in mainstream media over the past couple of weeks in relation to some personal matters, including some seemingly dubious mentoring arrangements. It has been well reported here and here and here.
The Tech Council has been largely silent on the controversy beyond a statement that said the billionaire had made the decision to “step aside” from public Tech Council duties while “personal matters” were being decided by a court.
This meant that Mr White had cancelled a scheduled appearance at the TCA National Tech Summit in Melbourne next month. But the Tech Council does not say what “resolved” means.
The court dispute between Mr White and a former lover has now been settled. But for the tech Council, the crisis remains a long way from resolved.
A series of revelations and accusations – some made through the court process and some outside of it – has raised the ire of prominent corporate members of the Tech Council, angry at the damage being done to the Tech Council platform.
The TCA has made gender equity issues and developing strategies for attracting more women into the tech workforce as central issues.
But the silence of the board as the Richard white drama has generated headlines day after day has created enormous frustration among some members, with back-channel communications between the membership understood to be running hot.
One senior executive told InnovationAus.com that the scandal was a massive set-back for the organisation. After the incredible impact of the Tech Council since it was launched three years ago, the executive says the issue runs the risk of reducing its influence.
Another senior executive said the industry needs to be sensitive to its history of demographic imbalance, and that this saga was 1980s “blokey stuff” that alienates women.
Still another executive expressed anger at how some corporate members who espoused the virtues of gender equity as part of their “values-driven” businesses had not spoken out publicly in relation to the actions of one of its representatives.
But it remains the imposition of the governance changes without consultation that has catalysed much of the resentment of members contacted by InnovationAus.com.
It is understood that following the rapid membership growth of the council in its first two years and the positive impact that it had on industry policy that outside consultants were brought in to advise on governance structures.
It’s success meant that the council had grown much faster than expected, with more employees and more moving parts.
But the governance review and its recommendations were never made available to the Tech Council membership, and certainly has never been made public. Some members only became aware of changes at the AGM in June.
As a side note, the original Tech Council constitution had been designed to put guard rails around the Australian voice of the organisation.
It stated that outside of the three executive directors, all board members had to either be a founder, a CEO or a chairperson of the company (or venture capital firm) that they represented.
This meant that Apple CEO Tim Cook was eligible to be a director of the Tech Council of Australia in the extremely unlikely event that he wanted to nominate, but that the local Apple Australia managing director was not. Likewise, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was eligible, but local Google Australia managing director Mel Silva was not.
This was an elegant mechanism to ensure that the local sales subsidiaries of multinational giants did not come to dominate the council.
It meant that although Atlassian is listed in the United States, its founder Scott Farquhar was eligible. Ditto for Canva (with its top company in the US) and its founder Cliff Obrecht, or Afterpay’s Anthony Eisen. Global companies, local leaders – that was the archetype for a Tech Council non-executive director.
The new Tech Council constitution has done away with this. It now allows for the appointment of mere mortal employees of a member company to the board.
And so PEXA’s chief technology officer Englantine Etiemble was appointed – despite being neither chair, nor CEO nor founder of the company she represents.
So why was the very impressive and qualified Englantine Etiemble appointed ahead of other impressive and qualified people who nominated? Like say Robin Khuda from AirTrunk, or John Paitaridis from CyberCX, who are both founders and CEO of the companies they represent.
If you were to believe the scuttlebutt, and this is not very nice, but you might think it was because Ms Etiemble is … a woman.
Which brings this terrible saga of the tech sector’s gender issues full circle.
It is understood that the Tech Council chair Robyn Denholm’s preferred candidate to replace :Different founder Mina Radhakrishnan’s position on the board was WiseTech’s Richard White.
But what to do about the optics? A young woman founder being replaced by an older white male billionaire? This would not do. Hmmm.
The constitution allowed for a maximum of ten directors, and only nine seats were filled. And so Ms Radakrishnan was replaced by two directors.
None of this is commentary on Ms Etiemble, who is very well respected and gets rave reviews.
Instead, this is a commentary on what a tangled web we weave.
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.