Chehade makes case for insider CEO in frank assessment of failings

Outgoing ICANN CEO has made a case for his successor to be somebody already intimately familiar with the ICANN community.
His remarks, which stopped short of explicitly recommending an insider take over his position when he leaves next March, came during a frank self-assessment of his shortcomings in the job at ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires yesterday.
“There are many things I could have done better or done differently,” Chehade said before an audience of Generic Names Supporting Organization members.
He freely confessed to jumping headlong into the job before he fully understood ICANN as a community; how it functions and where the real power is supposed to be wielded.
The key example of that, he said, was the creation of some of the rules now in use at the Trademark Clearinghouse.
“I meant well, I intended well, but I broke every process in the system,” he said. “I didn’t know, and I really didn’t realize that I didn’t until later.”
That’s a reference to late 2012, when Chehade convened a series of secretive, invitation-only community meetings that gave the Intellectual Property Constituency yet another chance to have rights protection mechanisms strengthened.
Chehade famously even asked participants to not even live-tweet during the discussions, it was not webcast, and recordings of (some of) the sessions were not published until DI filed a Documentary Information Disclosure Process request.
These “strawman” meetings culminated in the IPC being given the “Trademark+50” mechanism, which allows variations on trademarks to be protected, and the Non-Commercial Users Constituency to claim its voice had been under-represented and largely ignored.
For this reason and others, Chehade now says his successor had better have “very very good preparation and orientation”.
“Spending about seven minutes with the prior CEO before I took this job is not something I recommend,” he said, apparently a reference to time spent with his predecessor, Rod Beckstrom.
“This is a very complex job, and a very layered role, and I had no orientation to speak of,” he said. “If he or she is not someone who knows this community, this person better have a lot of orientation.”
He described how it took him some time to get to grips with the idea that he’s not a CEO in the conventional sense, able to make changes at will and answerable only to the board of directors.
“I am not a CEO,” he said. “There are types of CEO and this is a servant CEO job. Until you get that you keep hitting walls.”
He also described the job as “a politician without a flag” and “community facilitator”.
His biggest regret, he said, was failing to immediately realize that the facilitator function was the most important part of the job.
It took a clash last year about accountability being a key part of the IANA transition for him to realize this, he said.
“I hope you will all contribute in finding a person who will serve you well from day one, not like me, who from day one will arrive understanding all the parts of this,” he said.
Whether he intended it or not, this sounds like Chehade would err towards hiring an ICANN community veteran as his successor.
He said his replacement should be somebody who “knows all the things I learned, hopefully on day one, or on month one. Or on year one, but not three years in.”
It should be noted that Chehade turned down the chance to be a part of the team that will choose his successor.
Chehade’s position appears to diametrically opposed that of his predecessor. During Beckstrom’s tenure as “outgoing” CEO, he explicitly recommended an outsider take over the role.
“I hope that the person who replaces me will be of the highest integrity and has no recent or current commercial or career interests in the domain industry, because ICANN’s fairness, objectivity and independence are of paramount importance to the future of the internet,” Beckstrom said in October 2011.
Beckstrom’s remarks came as ICANN came under intensified scrutiny over perceived conflicts of interest.
Peter Dengate Thrush had recently come to the end of his tenure as ICANN chair, pushing through the (premature?) approval of the new gTLD program in his last few days on the job and joining applicant Minds + Machines just a few weeks later.
Chehade’s remarks yesterday come as ICANN is in a different position.
When he leaves next March, ICANN will either be freshly decoupled from its oversight relationship with the US government, or will be on the verge of it.
It won’t be an easy time for a new CEO to take over, trying to steer the organization under a fresh, untested set of governance principles.
When it comes to “insiders” with intimate knowledge of ICANN, there are a few community members not already on ICANN staff I could imagine pitching themselves for the CEO’s job.
But there’s also the possibility of an internal hire.
Remember, one of Chehade’s first actions upon taking the job was to hire the two other people who had been on the board’s final shortlist — Tarek Kamel and Sally Costerton.
Kamel, once a controversial minister in Mubarak’s Egyptian government, is currently Chehade’s senior advisor for government engagement.
Costerton was London-based EMEA CEO at the public relations agency Hill & Knowlton. Today, she’s the senior advisor for global stakeholder engagement. She maintains a blog about women in leadership positions that some readers might find eye-opening in the ICANN CEO search context.
Both were considered CEO material three years ago, and both now have three years of ICANN experience to put on their job applications (if they choose to file them).
So why is Chehade leaving ICANN? The persistent rumors have him either being offered the job of his dreams elsewhere, or suffering a severe case of ICANN burnout.
But yesterday he left little doubt whether his next job, which it has been confirmed he already has lined up, would be better that his current one.
“[ICANN CEO] is a beautiful job. It is a fantastic job. It is better job that I’ve ever had, or will ever have I think. It is amazing. Lucky is the person who will take my place,” he said.
So, um, why quit?
“The next phase of ICANN requires a different person. Don’t go rehire Fadi. You don’t need another Fadi. I was there for a purpose, for a time,” he said. “I am a classic change agent CEO. I either build things from scratch… or I transform things. ICANN doesn’t need this now.”
Asked to comment on his biggest successes, Chehade deferred, saying his legacy was something to talk about at a different time.

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Tagged: ceo, ICANN, icann 53