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I just finished reading a horror story, made all the worse because it is a true story involving failure to protect nuclear weapons secrets, lost management—and indirectly, me.

The story is told in a new book, Implosion at Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption and Cover-Ups Jeopardize America’s Nuclear Weapons Secrets, by Glenn Walp, Ph.D. Walp’s credentials are impeccable: former head of the Pennsylvania State Police, a master’s in criminal psychology and doctorate in human services, national police awards, and national media appearances. The latter were mostly about one other job he held: Office Leader of the Office of Security Inquiries at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the home of the atomic bomb. Walp did not hold the job long. He did it too well.

The Lab hired him as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees it, to professionalize the Lab’s criminal investigations. Almost immediately upon arriving, he began to uncover massive problems. Walp details how employees’ refusal to follow equipment management procedures left many items missing and untraceable, including computer equipment that might have held nuclear secrets. A mini-Mafia ran free at one facility, buying spy equipment with federal money and protected by a thug who threatened potential whistleblowers with violence. Walp describes rampant abuses of a system that allowed any Lab employee to purchase items at various stores by showing a Lab badge. From another source, I know that one year, more Leatherman tools were bought than there were employees at the Lab. Walp criticizes an internal delivery system that dropped off packages, including high-cost equipment, in open areas without anyone signing for them. He points out numerous lapses regarding both nuclear weapons information and “special nuclear materials,” raising the very real specter of terrorists getting at least enough of the latter to create a “dirty bomb”—a regular bomb that would irradiate people it didn’t kill outright.

The most shocking discovery was that upper managers had known about these problems for years. Furthermore, when Walp tried to do his job, those same managers began interfering with his investigations. When he tried to call in the FBI, he almost immediately received pushback from above. Eventually the chief lawyer at the Lab inserted himself between Walp and the FBI, to the point that Walp warned him of violating “obstruction of justice” laws. Every incident of missing computer memory devices brought the standard Lab refrain that no classified material was compromised, even though there was no way to be sure. The constant message was that Walp’s first loyalty must be to the Lab and the University of California, which had managed the Lab from the start, in 1943. Protecting the UC contract clearly was more important to top managers than protecting U.S. property or nuclear secrets. Walp and others had to resort to DOE’s formal whistleblower process. Despite the extra protections this gave them and outstanding written performance appraisals, Walp and an associate were fired because they “did not fit” with the Lab’s culture. They were quickly escorted off the property by armed guards. The “Mafia” don and his thug had only been placed on administrative leave initially (though they eventually went to prison).

All of this has been corroborated, by DOE and FBI investigators, many journalists, public interest groups, and the U.S. Congress. As a result, two Lab directors in a row and some managers were fired. Walp was rehired as a UC consultant and won a $1 million settlement for his firing, clearly retaliation for his whistleblowing.

I wish I could report things are much better, but they are not. The Lab was forced to team with defense contractor Bechtel and compete for the contract for the first time in 2005. Unbelievably, they won. No surprise, then, that Walp lays out yet more problems and continuing Lab denials through 2009.

One exchange in the book leapt out at me. Walp is talking to his boss. “Glenn, have you ever worked for a corporation before?, Falcon responded. It’s much different working for a corporation than it is for a government or for a governor, continued Falcon. The lab has a certain corporate philosophy and certain corporate rules that the employee must abide by…” Walp himself misses the massive problem with this statement. Los Alamos Lab is not a corporation! It is a federally owned facility managed at the time by a state government entity. This is the most egregious example of management denial I have ever read.

I was relieved the see, however, that Walp did not criticize the Lab’s written procedures for managing equipment (called “personal property”), but the failure to follow them. “Relieved” because, I wrote them.

The lab hired me as a contractor in 1994 to rewrite their equipment management manual. (I had my best-ever boss, Peggy Durbin, who sent me Implosion after I saw it in the world’s funniest business newsletter. She writes it for the bookstore in Los Alamos she co-owns now. You should sign up.) Realizing instantly the manual was an antiquated mess, I started over from scratch. When it became clear the only way to do this quickly was to get four groups of stakeholders working more efficiently, I requested permission to create self-directed work teams (SDWTs). It worked. Within a few months, we had a 350-page draft. In two years, these dedicated people had raised the property management system’s rating by outside auditors from failing to “Outstanding.” Four of the people I served are named, favorably, in Walp’s book.

However, I saw the rampant cultural problems he mentions, especially after I became a manager. My introduction of “management by walking around” was taken by many employees as micro-managing because they weren’t accustomed to any oversight. Most people in our group were treasures, but a significant number would have been fired by private industry years earlier. Upper managers gave little material support to best practices, clearly more interested in smooth sailing. The property SDWTs lost their empowerment. I heard the refrain about protecting the UC contract often. After three years in management I had enough, and I started TeamTrainers.

This post has been painful. I still love the Lab, both for many of the people and for much of the work it does. Walp praises the Lab’s science, which helps prevent the spread of nuclear materials, ensures U.S. weapons still serve as a deterrent, and has led research in a surprising array of topics from computer modeling to alternative energy sources to quantum physics.

I want to call the leaders in the book “blind,” but that would be an insult to blind people. “Lost managers” is a better term. They lost sight of who they really worked for. They lost sight of the real source of damage to the Lab, greater than PR problems. Some of them lost their jobs over it. If you as a manager make any effort to squelch reports of ethical violations, policy violations, and especially legal violations, you may be a lost manager. Let this book help you find your way, lest you destroy what you are trying to protect—even if it’s only your own backside.

Source: Walp, G. (2010) Implosion at Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption and Cover-Ups Jeopardize America’s Nuclear Weapons Secrets. Justice Publishing, LLC: Gold Canyon, Ariz. (received from Otowi Station Bookstore).

In another example of people relearning a well-established truth the hard way, plaintiffs in a U.S. Supreme Court case this week found out they could not use their work pagers for “sexting.” More to the point of this blog, I hope their managers learned a similar message: don’t tell people they have rights they don’t actually have.

To both sides I say, “Duh.”

As chronicled in the court’s opinion,  two police officers in Ontario, Calif., were going way over their monthly character limits for the alphanumeric pagers they had been issued by their department. The police chief requested transcripts of their messages to determine whether he needed to pay for higher limits or people were overloading them with personal messages. It turned out their on-duty messages were mostly personal, and many were sexual. After an investigation by the internal affairs office, the officers were disciplined. The Associated Press article on the case notes, “a police official… informally told officers that no one would audit their text messages if the officers personally paid for charges above a monthly allowance.” However, that was wrong. The city had a written policy to the contrary, and that trumped whatever that person said.

Granted, the policy did not specifically mention pager text messages. But trying to play that technicality reminds me of a TV show I saw this week, in which the father told the teen-age son to take his dirty dishes “to the kitchen.” The son dropped them off on the floor just inside the doorway, and when confronted, argued the father had not said to put them in the dishwasher.

Notice that because the plaintiffs were employed by a government, they could bring the Constitution into their argument. Although many employees seem to think otherwise, by itself the Constitution does not limit the rights of private companies. For example, a worker who claims they have a “right to free speech” about their company is simply wrong. That “right” prevents a government from censoring you (in most cases), but does not apply to a private entity unless Congress has created a law saying you have a right. Whistleblower rights–legal protections for people who report lawbreaking by their employers–exist because of federal law. (Usual disclaimer: I ain’t a lawyer, this is not legal advice, contact a lawyer for specifics).

Since my first exposure to this topic in a grad school Media Law course, I have seen case after case where employees were fired for doing personal stuff on computers, including moral and perfectly legal activities like side-business work.  There are exceptions, but generally speaking, since the office computer and telephone are owned by the company, the company can do whatever it wants with them. That usually includes watching or listening to what you are doing.

That said, I’ve also seen cases where the decision hinged on whether the company had a specific policy and enforced it consistently. My guess would be that if a company president was seen using his office computer to play online poker, and the company did not have an employee handbook saying otherwise, the courts might back someone who was fired for lawful personal use of their company computer. In “employment-at-will” states, where employers can fire someone for any reason not specified as against the law, even that argument might be hard to make. Nonetheless, not only are formal policies smart from the legal standpoint, they also are the ethical thing to do, giving people fair warning about how you define right-and-wrong.  Most of us think what we consider right should be obvious to everyone else, but you know that isn’t the way human beings work.

For employees, the AP article says, it is a “common-sense message”: “Use your own cell phone if you’ve got something to text that you don’t want your boss to read.” I would add a common-sense message to employers, which is to have a written policy on personal use you reinforce regularly. Since the City of Ontario did that, another common-sense message goes out to supervisors, which is, don’t interpret company policies on your own. If you aren’t absolutely sure how a policy impacts an employee question, go ask whoever is responsible for the policy.

Unfortunately, as I’ve long said, I prefer to call this kind of thinking “horse sense.” There seem to be more horses than there are people who have that sense, so it isn’t all that common.

Two nights ago I attended a Raleigh Chamber of Commerce event for our local elected officials. Although I always feel a little out of place at such events, I am a veteran networker and dived right into the fray. The officials and business “names” in the crowd were gracious and approachable, I’m pleased to report.

You never “sell” at these events, so I did my “bartender” routine, as I call it. (My long-time joke is that I’m the guy who walks into a bar and ends up with the bartenders telling me their problems!) I asked questions and learned about the various folks. With business people, I asked what their companies did and kept digging. With officials, I first thanked them for serving. As a former reporter, I have talked to many elected officials from city councilors to U.S. senators. No matter what I thought of a person’s politics, I have found the vast majority genuine in their interest in doing good. That night I asked how they handled the stress, what got them started in office, and other such human questions, in part to see if I could pick up any interesting ideas I could pass along to people in my classes.

One such conversation turned up a pearl. I spent at least 20 minutes talking one-on-one with a state senator. I’d love to be a name-dropper here, but my ex-reporter ethics won’t let me since he didn’t know he was speaking to a blogger. Anyway, he mentioned an incident from his business days. His company was losing a lot of tools through “shrinkage,” internal stealing. Instead of taking a harsh, punitive approach, he went the exact opposite direction. He told the managers to give each employee a $100 budget to buy the tools they needed. The shrinkage stopped.

This is a fantastic example of using employee empowerment, in this case to solve a problem you would never expect it to fix. By making employees responsible for the problem they were causing–and, importantly, combining that with the resources and authority to address them–he solved the problem without lifting (or wagging) a finger.

He seemed genuinely saddened by his inability as a legislator to treat state workers with that same compassion and ingenuity. It was reassuring to remind myself regarding our legislators the same thing I ask team leaders to keep in mind about their employees: they are human beings first and foremost, and most of them want to do good.

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