The Ethical Imperative, with Andrew Cooper (Legal, Business, Leadership, Technology)
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That is our nature as human beings. We're tinkerers by nature. And as a result, we are also very greedy as humans. We want to protect those things that we create.
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Today's guest is Andrew Cooper, a top attorney in his field, having led several legal teams for UPS, served as an intellectual property analyst for Coca-Cola, and now serves as the legal coordinator and head of patent acquisitions for Meta. His book, The Ethical Imperative, Reading with Conscience to Shape the Future of Business, is out now.
Andy, I'm Stephanie Moss. How are you?
I'm well. How are you, Stephanie?
I'm good. I'll ask that super open-ended question. Start at the beginning and tell me a little bit about you and your super interesting journey.
Sure. So I am from a small town in South Carolina called Walterboro. If you are traveling down 95, you will pass right by it. i had no idea no concept of what intellectual property was or even the practice of law until i was in high school and my uh my father brought home a movie called separate but equal and i became exposed to the law and what lawyers can do and that began kind of my curiosity to the practice of law i ultimately went to college in washington dc and grad school in atlanta georgia at emory While at Emory, I did a few internships, one with the Coca-Cola company, and that's really what started me down the path of IP, really exposed me to the concept speed of innovation. And for companies like Coca-Cola, innovation is key to them staying at the head of their industry. And it should be something that small business owners think about as well.
After leaving Coca-Cola, I went to practice law at Shook, Hardy & Bacon in the patent litigation group. Moved from there to UPS. I was the vice president of UPS, the chief IP counsel there, and worked for UPS Airlines. So my UPS history was about seven years. And then I transitioned from UPS to Meta Platforms, which is where I am now. And I am the head of patent acquisitions. I also do technology transactions, open source, and AI work for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
So not a bad journey from a boy from... Walterboro.
Yes, Walterboro, South Carolina.
Population of... 5,000. Oh my gosh. Okay. So Walterboro to Okinawa. Tell me about that.
Oh yeah. So I didn't even touch on Okinawa, but yes, when I was nine years old, around nine years old, my dad was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, U.S. Marine Corps. And so we moved to Okinawa, Japan. We were there for four years. A lot of my formative kind of relationships and formative years were there in Japan. We stayed on base, went to Department of Defense schools and opened my eyes to The importance of working with people from all walks of life, all backgrounds, that core value, I think, in organizations today is really important. I also talk about this in the book, the importance of building open systems. That's organizations that are able to assimilate information from various centers of innovation and to incorporate those really quickly into products and services.
The organizations that we build today in the United States tend to be hierarchical. They tend to be pyramid structures. Better organizations, future organizations should be more like a biological cell where you have lots of information coming in and being assimilated and worked through and finally incorporated into the organism. And those things that are bad, you kind of kick out. And those things that are good, you make a part of the system. And that really, I think, started my journey and thinking about open systems, diversity and inclusion and how to make organizations stronger.
What a very real experience. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you to kind of educate us a little bit. Walk me through this idea of what is intellectual property.
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