Dr. Jack London

“In my experience, we need to start all our discussions about board membership, accountability, and responsibility with the term ‘leadership,’” said CACI International Executive Chair Dr. J. “Jack” Phillip London. “Leaders cultivate and sustain an organization’s culture. They set the expectations right from the beginning. They are continually communicating what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate in terms of behavior. And that’s done by example, by discussion, by dialogue, and by role modeling.” As London pointed out, however, having leaders with  strength of character is not enough to transform an organization’s culture.

London further explained his view of the role of the board in helping to establish and perpetuate a strategically advantageous culture during an interview with Steven R. Walker, NACD general counsel and managing director, Board Advisory Services Group. Among the highlights, excerpted from their interview, were his reflections on contagions, communication, and culpability.

For these aspiring directors and current directors, how can the board verify and check on the fact that every company holds itself as having high integrity and high ethics?

One of the things that we’ve done at CACI in the last year or so is put together our culture, character, integrity, and ethics [board] committee. We have at least 20,000 employees around the planet, and we surveyed them to get feedback on how they viewed the company’s culture, our standards of ethics, and our operational perspectives on being innovative. This committee is now in the process of putting together a dashboard of metrics that we can use to assess and evaluate as we go along. Turnover rates, anonymous reports of problems—those kinds of things. Of course, you want to do it in a light-handed way. You’re trying to bring people along and encourage them. It’s amazing what happens when you ask people to perform with sincerity and integrity. Good folks, well-intended folks, will tend to rise to the requirement, and it’s amazing how that can be contagious. And the beauty of that is, when there are people who come along who don’t subscribe to that kind of thing, they find a way to meander out the door.

What was the motivation to create the board’s culture, character, integrity, and ethics committee?

I saw too many things going in the wrong direction in our society, our culture, our government, religious institutions, and the athletic world that I didn’t care for. And I thought, “We’ve got a pretty good culture at CACI, and I think we’ve got a good reputation. Let’s put something together that can sustain this.”

How do you, as a leader, make sure the board has access to the layers beyond the C-suite and has open access to things and can nip problems in the bud?

We have concerns in that area. One of the things I do is go around to my organizations and sit down and talk to people. I meet with our customers. I’m confident that the board wants me to do that. And when you do it in the field, you’re diving way below a lot of players. And I’m amazed at the kinds of questions I get in one of these sessions.

Communication’s a big deal. And we work hard at making sure we communicate with our people. But it takes persistent effort and, again, priority, and one of the wonderful things is that our leadership group—the CEO, general counsel, and human resources executive vice president—are very on board with this. By the way, they are members of our culture, character, integrity, and ethics committee. It’s not just board people. It’s members of the C suite and others, and I’ve even thought about bringing on some people that are outside the corporation with appropriate liability considerations.

How do you address crisis from the top?

Well, you’re probably talking about our Abu Ghraib situation. If there’s anything that I’ll absolutely never forget in my career, it’s the experience that CACI went through with the wrongful allegations and charges with regard to our interrogators in the early days of [the war in] Iraq. I first found out when Seymour Hersh put out his article in The New Yorker [in 2004] making some claims. The public was ready to hang me. I made the fairly early discovery that the allegations in the leaked report had flaws in them. They had listed some people in there as being our employees, who weren’t our employees.

And so, I dug down into it and found out that our culpability was really misrepresented. It gave me the fortitude, commitment, and the confidence to stand up on it. The main problem was a lot of people wanted to have me fired because of the type of work that we were doing. I would save my neck in the media at least by letting all those people go, but that was not the right thing to do. If you just hang in there, and you’re credible, and you’ve got your facts together, you’re going to prevail—and our reputation today is probably better than ever.

Dr. J. “Jack” Phillip London is the Executive Chairman of the board of CACI International, a Fortune 1000 Largest company that provides services to many branches of the federal government, and serves on the boards of the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation, the Naval Historical Foundation, Friends of the National WWII Memorial, the Senior Advisory Board of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, and CAUSE (Comfort for America’s Uniformed Services), the “wounded warriors” support organization. He has served on numerous other boards and foundations.