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16 March 2012

Mehdi Hasan on fighting leaks: Apple vs Labour

By Mehdi Hasan

Close allies Paul Staines (aka “Guido Fawkes”) and Dan Hodges have been blogging all week about chaos, confusion and general goings-on inside the Labour Party based, it seems, on leaks from inside the party’s soon-to-be-vacated Victoria HQ in central London.

Yesterday, former Labour special adviser Paul Richards tweeted:

Whoever the person at Labour HQ is who’s giving @GuidoFawkes hourly updates, I wish they’d stop it. Whatever the beef, it won’t fix it.

My new colleague Alex Hern reminds me of a story told by John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, about how the late Steve Jobs of Apple dealt with leakers:

One of the struggles we were going through when [Steve Jobs] came back was that Apple was about the leakiest organization in history — it had gotten so bad that people were cavalier about it. In the face of all those leaks, I remember the first all company e-mail that Steve sent around after becoming Interim CEO again — he talked in it about how Apple would release a few things in the coming week, and a desire to tighten up communications so that employees would know more about what was going on — and how that required more respect for confidentiality. That mail was sent on a Thursday; I remember all of us getting to work on Monday morning and reading mail from Fred Anderson, our then-CFO, who said basically: “Steve sent mail last week, he told you not to leak, we were tracking everyone’s mail, and 4 people sent the details to outsiders. They’ve all been terminated and are no longer with the company.

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