Patricia C. Dunn

Patricia Cecile Dunn (born March 271953), aka Patricia Cecile Dunn-Jahnke, is the former Global CEO of Barclays Global Investors (BGI), one of the world’s largest and most successful investment management firms, a position she held from 1998 to 2002. Ms. Dunn began her career with the firm’s predecessor organization, Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, which introduced the world’s first index fund in 1971, and which was a pioneer in the field of quantitative asset management. Ms. Dunn is most closely associated with driving BGI’s global growth in the period following Barclays PLC’s purchase of Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors, and for her advocacy of the firm’s major iShares investment products, exchange-traded funds which subsequently transformed the landscape of index investing.

Early life and education

Born in in Burbank, California, Dunn grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, where her father, Henry Dunn, was Entertainment Director at the Dunes Hotel and subsequently the Hotel Tropicana. Her mother, Ruth, was a homemaker who had met Henry Dunn when she worked briefly as a showgirl in New York, her birthplace. When Dunn was eleven, her father died. Her mother subsequently moved the family, including a sister, Debbie, 12, and brother, Paul, 2, to Marin County,California. [1]

Dunn entered the University of Oregon in 1970, but later had to drop out to support her mother and young brother . She resumed college and graduated from UC Berkeley ,With Highest Honors, in 1975 with a BA in Journalism.

Career

After college, Dunn began working as a temporary secretary at Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, and rose through a variety of portfolio management, trading, sales and client service roles before being named co-Chairman of Barclays Global Investors (BGI), the company that was formed when Barclays PLC acquired Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors GI in 1995.

Dunn joined the HP (Hewlett-Packard) Board of Directors in 1998, having been recruited by then-Chairman and CEO Lou Platt, who was taking steps to diversify the company’s Board, which at the time was dominated by family members and close associates of founders David Packard and Bill Hewlett. Within a year of joining the board, Platt announced that he no longer felt he was the right person to lead the company into the internet age, and he led the search committee that recommended Carly Fiorina as the company’s new CEO. Dunn was asked to remain on the HP board subsequent to its divestiture of that part of the company which became Agilent Corporation, and, as Chairman, Ms. Fiorina asked her to become Chairman of the Audit Committee in 2002. She succeeded Ms. Fiorina as Chairman, in a non-executive capacity, having been asked by the Board on the day of Ms. Fiorina’s departure to take on the role.

Ms. Dunn resigned from her executive role at BGI in July, 2002, having received her second cancer diagnosis in several months. On September 22, 2006 she also resigned her roles of both non-Executive Chairman and as a director of HP. Since that time, she has focused her professional commitments, particularly since resigning from the HP board, on non-profit activities. She is a frequent speaker at business and corporate governance conferences, and serves on the Board and Executive Committee of Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco, is a member of the Board of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, a director of the UCSF Foundation and a member of the UCSF Executive Committee, a member of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania’s Director’s Leadership Council, a member of the Advisory Board of the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, and is a board member of the Ohana Foundation in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. In 2007, Dunn launched the Immune Therapy Initiative for Ovarian Cancer in partnership with Randall Caudill and Dr. George Coukos at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center.

Controversy

Dunn was at the center of a controversy regarding her involvement in an investigation conducted by HP concerning board-level leaks to reporters in 2005-2006. In this investigation, which was undertaken at the behest of the board, HP hired companies that obtained personal telephone records of HP board members and reporters who covered HP through a practice called pretexting. [3] Although Ms. Dunn’s involvement in the investigation was arms-length, as she herself was a subject of the investigation and was “pretexted” by the investigators, she became drawn into the controversy after a former board member, Tom Perkins, a powerful billionaire who had resigned in anger from the board when his best friend on the board was identified as the leak, campaigned to have her removed from the board for not covering up his identity from the rest of the board.

While “pretexting” was not illegal in California at the time, and while Ms. Dunn had no role in selecting or overseeing the tactics used by investigators, Mr. Perkin’s campaign to have her charged with crimes (which public statements and records indicate he took to several regulatory authorities including the US Attorney and the California State Attorney General), was ultimately successful in forcing Ms. Dunn’s resignation as HP’s non-executive Chairman. On 12 September 2006, HP announced that Mark Hurd, the CEO who was hired based on a search led by Dunn, would replace her as Chairman after the HP board meeting on 18 January 2007 and that Dunn would continue as an HP board member after 18 January 2007. Mr. Perkins continued his campaign to have her removed from the Board, retaining Mark Corallo, former Presidential Adviser Karl Rove’s public relations expert, to conduct a damning campaign concerning her role in the leak investigation. The September 18 issue of Newsweek Magazine pictured Ms. Dunn on its cover with the headline, “The Boss Who Spied on Her Board.” Under mounting pressure, Mr. Hurd announced at a press conference on September 22, 2006 that she was resigning, effective immediately, both as Chairman as a Director of HP. Hurd replaced her as Chairman.

Dunn was called to testify before a sub-committee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in Washington, DC on September 28, 2006. She submitted a 33-page written statement outlining the facts pertaining to her involvement in the matter, and was subjected to five hours of questioning by Committee members. She also told her side of the story to “60 Minutes” on the day she was charged with four felonies. No factual evidence has ever surfaced to contradict Ms. Dunn’s written and oral testimony and public statements about her role in the HP matter.

On 4 October 2006, Dunn and four others were charged by California attorney general Bill Lockyer with four felony counts: fraudulent use of wire, radio or television transmissions; taking, copying, and using computer data without authorization; identity theft; and conspiracy. Lockyer has issued arrest warrants for all five of those so charged. [4] Dunn was arraigned on November 17, 2006. On March 14, 2007, the judge in the case dropped all criminal charges against her in the "interests of justice." The dropping of the criminal charges by Judge Cunningham came after Dunn refused to take a plea of one misdemeanor in exchange for four felonies before the preliminary hearing. Bill Lockyer, who was running for State Treasurer and who was criticized for bringing the case against Dunn, defended his decision in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal.

HP General Counsel Ann Baskins resigned on September 28, 2006. Baskins, who advised Dunn about "tightening control over Board members", was not indicted by Lockyer.

Private life

Dunn has survived breast cancer and melanoma, and was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer in January 2004. Chemotherapy treatment led to remission until August 2006, when she underwent surgery to remove liver metastases. Dunn was scheduled to start chemotherapy for advanced ovarian cancer on 6 October 2006 at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center. [5]

The Immune Therapy Initiative for Ovarian Cancer (ITIOC)

In 2007, Dunn co-founded the Immune Therapy Initiative for Ovarian Cancer (ITIOC) with Randall Caudill in partnership with Dr. George Coukos of the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center. The ITIOC’s objective is to raise $3.3 million in philanthropic funding to support research and clinical trials for a breakthrough treatment therapy for advanced ovarian cancer based on immune therapy, a new combination approach to cancer treatment pioneered by Dr. Carl June, Director of Translational Research at Penn among others.

Family

While at Wells Fargo, Dunn met William Jahnke, former head of Wells Fargo Investment Advisors and a pioneer in quantitative investing, whom she married in 1981. The couple owns a winery, Murray Street Vineyards in the Barossa Valley of South Australia, a home in Hawaii and a home in Contra Costa County, California. Ms. Dunn became mother to Mr. Jahnke’s four children soon after they married, and they have several grandchildren and a close extended family.

References

^ Stewart, J: "The Kona Files", New Yorker, Feb 19 & 26, 2007, 154. ^ HP Board members biographies ^ HP engulfed in extraordinary boardroom fight, San Jose Mercury News, 2006-09-06 ^ Ex-Hewlett-Packard Chair Dunn Charged in Leak Case ^ KPIX-TV 2006-10-04

External links

* [http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/7/hp 2006 Separate videos of Fiorina and Dunn after HP pretexting scandal] 2006-10-08