Former Gates Foundation CDO Todd Pierce was awarded $4.9 million in damages after he was terminated from his job less than 17 months after being hired.
And good news for the rest of us: the event serves as a case study for how not to hire a Chief Data Officer.
Pierce, a senior vice-president at Salesforce before he was heavily recruited by the Gates Foundation COO Leigh Morgan, claimed that he was undermined from the very start and denied the opportunity to execute his vision for the foundation. This was the very thing that was emphasized at Pierce’s recruitment and what he was hired to accomplish.
The Gates Foundation said it would appeal the court’s decision.
A fuller account of the Pierce’s termination can be found in Nat Levy’s report in GeekWire:
While there is no question Bill Gates understood the CDO role, others at the Foundation did not. And, unfortunately, Morgan did not lay the groundwork for a CDO to succeed. For example, there is no evidence she analyzed or even considered how a CDO would fit into the organization or its work flow at any point during her recruitment of Pierce; she did not discuss with program staff who were already engaged in digital technologies about the need or desire for such a role; and perhaps worse, she sent inconsistent messages about the job.
In fact, while Morgan emphasized the expanded nature of the role to certain people [e.g., Pierce, Gates, (Gates Foundation CEO Sue) Desmond-Hellmann] she repeatedly told internal constituents that Pierce’s number one job was to ‘fix IT.” At trial, when asked whether she said anything similar to Pierce before he accepted the job, Morgan’s testimony in the affirmative was, at best, unconvincing. She could point to no documentary support for it and, as with many other aspects of her testimony, she was not credible. Time and again, she said different things to different people depending on what was most politically expedient.
For her part, Desmond-Hellmann admits that convincing program-side leaders and staff to engage in broad, cross-program ideas was a ‘tall order’ then and now. She did not survey employees about the need for a CDO prior to offering the job to Pierce, explaining she did not need to because she ‘would have predicted the outcome of the survey,’ which was that program staff would have asked ‘what is a CDO and why do I have one?’
King County Superior Court Judge Catherine Shaffer’s full Findings of Fact can be found here.
