It Drove Perkins Nuts

Applying a Personality Type Lens to the Conflict at HP

“Please raise your hand if you don’t deal with conflict at work.”

This is a question I use in training sessions when I introduce the subject of Personality Type and Conflict Resolution.

A single hand has never gone in the air.

Conflict. We all deal with it. But how?

Left unattended, it can have ruinous effects on careers and corporations. In fact, personality conflict appears to be the root cause for the debacle at HP. Once the pride of the Silicon Valley, HP is in the throes of a scandal where directors’ phone records were obtained by a possibly illegal process called “pretexting.” Pretexters allegedly impersonated directors and asked for their phone records in an effort to gain information that would help stem leaks from confidential HP board meetings to the media, including the Wall Street Journal and Business Week.

According to the September 18, 2006 cover story of Newsweek, personality differences ran amok between then-chairwoman Patti Dunn, who has since resigned, and Tom Perkins, who stepped down from the HP board in May of 2006, presumably because he discovered that he had been the subject of HP spying. 

Those of you familiar with Jung’s theory as explicated in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and applied in the SST®: Successful Selling to Type program, will readily recognize that Dunn is Sensing preferred (concentrating on details and the here and now) while Perkins is Intuitive (preferring the big picture and focusing on the future). Here’s an excerpt from that article that highlights their Sensing and Intuitive differences:

“Perkins, the venture capitalist, thought in broad strategic strokes, preferring to leave the details to others. Dunn thought the core of her job was to dot the I’s and cross the T’s …..It drove Perkins nuts…He recalls a meeting in his office with her in which he wanted to discuss how to compete better with Dell, IBM and others. According to Perkins, she was fixated instead on her discovery that there were inconsistencies between HP’s bylaws and the Corporate Director Handbook. Those inconsistencies then occupied hours of discussion at subsequent board meetings.”

Newsweek, September 18, 2006, p. 42

The operative sentence in this excerpt is: “It drove Perkins nuts.” We can all behave in ways natural to us and well intended but that still drive people around us nuts. There is no right or wrong in this Newsweek account. Indeed preparing competitive strategy and fixing inconsistencies in documents are both important. However, it appears that Dunn overlooked two essentials of effective leadership by failing to:

1. Balance natural preferences by using both Sensing and Intuition

2. Recognize that it is less about the leader’s needs and preferences and more about those of others. Clearly, Perkins had a need to talk about HP’s competitive strategy. And spending hours of time at the board level dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s drove him nuts.

The table below lists some behaviors we can all undertake to help resolve conflict. It presupposes that the reader knows his or her Jungian preferences, either from the MBTI or SST. If you are unsure and would like to learn more, please contact me, and I would be happy to help arrange that.

Whatever you take from this article, remember what happened to Patti Dunn and HP when they failed to execute effective conflict resolution strategies. Don’t let it happen to you.

MBTI Preferences: Conflict & Resolution Behavior Strategies

Sondra VanSant’s Wired for Conflict (CAPT, 2003) serves as a resource for this table.

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