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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > June > 05
Friday, June 5, 2009
Kevin Riley: NCR’s Nuti at least owed us honesty
Bill Nuti worried this community’s leaders from the beginning.
And it wasn’t just because the NCR board agreed — a year after it hired the CEO — that he didn’t have to move to Dayton after all.
Ohio, Montgomery County and Dayton officials saw Nuti’s predecessor, Mark Hurd, as engaged in the community and a supporter of Dayton. They believed they were close to reaching a deal with him to expand here, and they were devastated when he left for Hewlett-Packard.
Because Nuti never wanted to talk about those conversations — or anything else — last week’s announcement that the company is leaving for Georgia felt like it had been in the works for a long time.
But the worst part has been Nuti’s aloofness and lack of honesty.
According to Jon Hoak, former general counsel for NCR and current vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer for Hewlett-Packard, Nuti never valued, or took time to understand, Dayton.
Hoak, who said he was relating his personal views and not those of his company, called NCR’s decision “sad.” “I think it could have been avoided,” he said. “For whatever reason, the management team didn’t want to become part of Dayton.”
Nuti, who has declined repeated requests for interviews from this newspaper, didn’t invent his management style at NCR.
According to Newsday, just before taking the NCR job, he made a public commitment to his role in the Long Island, N.Y., business community when he was the head of the extremely troubled Symbol Technologies. He had also sent a memo to the Symbol staff that said: “I am committed to Symbol Technologies and I intend to be here for the long term,” the newspaper said.
After he became CEO, Nuti closed down an NCR plant in Scotland. According to The Scotsman newspaper, he informed the company’s 650 workers that they would be losing their jobs by having them watch a pre-recorded video.
“It’s just a disgrace the way we’ve been treated,” one worker told the newspaper. The newspaper also said that Nuti had earlier assured community leaders that the company was committed to the plant.
Even with the pressures of the down economy, today’s management gurus are preaching transparency and candor.
So why would a CEO do things this way? Why not just tell communities and employees a company’s situation and your plans?
According to Roy J. Lewicki, an expert on business ethics and professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, there are a couple of explanations.
Lewicki said often executives are driven by arrogance or embarrassment. Of Nuti’s plan to move NCR, he said: “This looks like arrogance. It may be fear, but it looks like arrogance.”
Lewicki says companies and their leaders enjoy informal, but important, contracts with the communities they operate in.
“One would think more of the company and its leadership if they could handle this with more decency,” he said.
In August of 2006, Nuti told the Dayton Daily News:
“I think that being a good corporate citizen is good business. We’re very happy in Dayton. We feel NCR is a part of Dayton. We continue to give a great deal of our time and resources to this community, and we will continue to be a strong advocate for this community. I think NCR is committed to Dayton for the long term.”
Either that wasn’t true then, or, in the past three years, he changed his mind.
While Nuti was avoiding conversations with local officials, he definitely was taking Georgia’s calls. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Nuti spoke with Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue in mid-February, about the same time when Dayton and Ohio officials were trying to get a meeting with him. Georgia’s legislature also was passing a huge tax break bill that NCR is now tapping.
Congratulatory e-mails passed around by one of the Atlanta area’s chambers of commerce said local officials “began working with our partners at the State … on this project in late 2007.”
NCR has had a long run of chief executives who treated the community and its employees with respect, even when they were making wrenching decisions — laying off workers by the thousands, closing plants and making draconian cuts.
Dayton knows, Dayton remembers all too well, that Bill Nuti is not the first NCR chief executive who found himself leading in trying times. He has just done so with less honor.
Permalink | Comments (23) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Economy, Kevin Riley, Local Business, Ohio politics
Guest column: NCR’s exodus should be impetus to revamp tax structure, government
Bill Pote, an information technology consultant who lives in downtown Dayton, is involved with DaytonCREATE and the Greater Downtown Dayton Plan. This piece was adapted from his blog, DaytonMostMetro.com.
We’d like to thank NCR for the 125 years they’ve been a part of Dayton. We appreciate the support you’ve shown to our arts and cultural groups and other nonprofits. We will always cherish the rich history that your company has had with us, going back to the days of John Patterson.
NCR’s departure comes as no surprise to those of us who have been trying to work with the company over the past several months to no avail. We regret their decision to unceremoniously abandon Dayton.
But, starting this minute, we look forward to new opportunities with emerging and growing businesses and remain committed to all of those companies that actually wish to stay and grow in the Dayton region.
We will not dwell on what has been lost. But we will take advantage of this opportunity to make bold changes that will transform our city and region.
Dayton’s past represents the era of a few mega-corporations that the community relied on in every facet of life. But Dayton’s future represents a new environment created to attract and nurture thousands of small and medium-sized businesses that are able to innovate, grow and retain top talent. This new reality will require a completely new way of operating at the local, regional and state levels. We are dedicated to making the hard decisions that will get us to where we need to be.
These words weren’t spoken this week. But they are what the region’s leaders should have been saying when we learned that NCR Corp. was moving to Georgia. NCR’s departure has struck a nerve at the highest levels in state and local governments. Let’s capitalize on that attention. Let’s focus on doing hard work.
Transforming the tax structure. We must completely overhaul our antiquated tax structure that may have made sense decades ago, but is now the single largest force that prevents our region from working together.
The system forces cities to rely on the income tax, counties to rely on the sales tax and townships to rely on the property tax. Added to a political climate that pits rural and suburban communities against cities, it is no wonder our region is so divided. Change must happen at the state level in order to implement a more equitable tax structure that encourages communities to work together rather than compete.
Simplify, consolidate and cut. We must consolidate similar organizations, cut every duplicate administrative role and streamline our organizations. We have to free up more resources to invest in our communities and businesses. It is never easy to kill positions, but businesses do it every day in order to survive. We must do it if we are to survive as a region.
Change the culture. We must finally transform ourselves away from a series of individual counties and communities competing with one another and into a single region that values the unique identities of individual communities, but that works closely together to ensure that every investment and development decision is made to maximize benefits for the entire region.
Only when the diversity of choices our region offers — to residents and businesses — is considered an asset rather than an “us vs. them” argument will we become a unified region. And only when we become a unified region will we become attractive to outside business and investment.
Strengthen the core. The entire region is seeing the effects of having a weak urban core. Businesses are attracted to regions with strong central cities. While others debate whether the city’s leadership has done its job, those we elect in the future must be able to inspire confidence and speak not just for the city, but for the region — even if they do not have any official regional power outside of the city’s borders.
City government must do a much better job of attracting residents and businesses to the core. At the same time, our suburbs must get over their irrational attitudes and biases against the city and understand, once and for all, that we’re in this together.
Do we have the will to make Dayton a different, yet stronger, city and region? Or are we paralyzed by the enormous challenges we face as Dayton sinks further into irrelevance and becomes an exurb to Cincinnati?
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Bill Pote, City of Dayton
