Andrew Cooper
speaker
89 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Andrew Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, non-competes and non-solicitation are more on the side of employment law. They really deal with communications with employees that leave an organization and what they can and can't say to folks who remain inside that organization. So from a non-solicit perspective, you can't go and try to pull or entice other employees from where you're leaving.
On the non-compete side, it's adjacent to IP in the sense that the idea is you have developed some level of knowledge that is unique to an industry. And if you were to leave a company... the same industry and go to another company that is a competitor, you may take that knowledge with you into the competitor's shop and use it in a way that is detrimental to the company that you're leaving.
So it's adjacent to IP because it does deal with know-how. And there are some rules about what you can restrict from the perspective of a person that is covered by a non-compete. So information that is derived from working within an organization, just as a result of you being there, you've developed a level of expertise.
Typically, you're not supposed to prevent someone from leveraging their expertise in order to earn a living, especially if it's in a market that's really small, like a duopoly. Going back to the Coke example, you get Coke and Pepsi, very large competitors.
A non-compete that is so broad that would prevent any Coca-Cola executive from moving over to PepsiCo and not being able to leverage just their generalized skills as a lawyer or a scientist or a salesperson, those would probably run afoul. And of course, this is not legal advice. You'd have to check with a lawyer. I My experience has been those typically don't fly.
But you can narrowly tailor non-competes in a way, as long as they are short in duration and specific to, for example, the work that an individual has done while they were there. So if you were an amazing research scientist that came up with some novel ideas,
you know, containers that extend the life of sodas, you could potentially prevent that person from going to a direct competitor and working on the exact same stuff. They can still work as a scientist, they can work on other projects, but typically you could narrowly tailor in that way. To your point, there's been a push to change non-competes at a federal level. Some companies have gone...
too far with how they have sought to restrict the work of employees. And so the jury is still out.
Sure. So in 2018, I was the Vice President and General Counsel of EPS Airlines. Moved to Louisville, Kentucky and started the role there. I was positioned as, hey, this is an opportunity for you to take on senior leadership, large organization, 20,000 employees, and then COVID happened.
And so I began journaling about the challenges that my team were going through and strategies for helping them to regain and retain high performance through that crisis. And I think it was a crisis for just about everyone. And so
As I was doing research into like strategies that executives had used in the past, what I realized was that there are really four things, four moral imperatives that any leader has to really focus on. And that's the first is to work responsibly. quickly, to move with speed.
If you look at organizations prior to the 1970s, a lot of those organizations, and they were run by the silent generation, greatest generation, those organizations tended to divest power closer to managers, closer to frontline supervisors, allowed employees to take a more active role in the decisions of the life of the organization.
And so that's where this concept of speed as a moral imperative comes from. It actually relates to our topic of intellectual property because the rate of innovation of an organization says a lot about its speed. Slow organizations tend to be less innovative.
They tend to not engender or encourage the types of ideas from their employees that allow them to be avant-garde, to allow them to be at the front of the pack. And it shows in the number of patents that they file, many other ways.
The second moral imperative is really to lead with inspiration, to connect the work that we are doing to some benefit to the world that is a goal that we can all share in. Organizations like Coca-Cola and their work on water replenishment, organizations like Bombas and their work on providing socks to the homeless. These are critical pieces of the employee engagement puzzle, really.
It's a puzzle that we have to solve. And so when I was working through the pandemic, I realized that by being a part of Operation Warp Speed, that was the Trump administration's push to deliver medicines and vaccines around the world. It gave our employees a North Star. It was something that said, hey, we are part of a movement to save the world.
The whole idea, the slogan, it's a patient, not a package, was really motivating during that time. The third moral imperative is community investment. Again, going back to organizations prior to the 1970s, what we found were organizations that invested in communities heavily. So Hershey, Pennsylvania would not be a place without Hershey. Bentonville, Arkansas would not be a place without Walmart.
Coca-Cola even, Atlanta would not be the type of place it was without Coca-Cola and Chick-fil-A and some of the other companies that have really opened up their organizations to addressing needs of communities. And what we find is that organizations that identify a place that they want to transform
And go about a strategic vision in doing that, even if it's public or even if it's a public-private engagement or just a private movement, it doesn't matter. The outcomes of those communities tend to be better than, for example, places like Walterboro, South Carolina, where there's been economic distress for a long, long time. So the community investment becomes a really critical piece.
Showing 41–60 of 89 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →