Interlude - Index of

82 | Turbulent Adolescence
before NetApp, one of their large customers wasn’t paying
their bills. Or rather, they’d pay some bills but not others.
Dan met with them to find out why. They reviewed purchase
orders together and found one that hadn’t been paid. The customer
looked carefully at the PO and said, “That’s not my signature.
I never ordered that system.”
NET was riddled with fraud: the sales team was creating
fake orders and sending systems to secret warehouses instead
of to real customers. When the scheme unraveled, the CEO
was fired, the CFO was fired, and the head of sales was fired.
Dan had joined as chief operating officer (COO), but the
board asked him to be CEO and clean up the mess. He had
to cope with an SEC investigation, a shareholder class action
lawsuit, and the stock plummeting from $35 to $6. Worst of
all, the fraud made it look as though the company’s growth was
much greater than it really was, and as a result, they had hired
more people than they could afford. They had to lay off a third
of the workforce. The experience left Dan with strong feelings
about values, or the lack thereof.
A year after that first failed attempt at NetApp values, Dan
broached the subject again at an offsite meeting with his staff. I
was uncomfortable at first, but to his credit, he didn’t try to tell
me what to believe. Instead, he talked about what was important
to him and his aspirations for the kind of company that
he hoped NetApp would become. He shared the fraud story—
the kind of company he hoped we would not become. And he
encouraged his staff to share their thoughts as well. In other
words, he sort of eased us into assembling a list of values.
Some of our values might appear on any company’s list:
trust, integrity, teamwork, and so on. At first, it seemed odd to