Telephone book publisher R.H. Donnelley hired a guy with no college degree to be its CEO, but it didn’t tell anybody.
Instead, the North Carolina-based company portrayed David C. Swanson, 51, as a veritable baccalaureate.
“Swanson received a B.S. from St. Cloud University in 1977,” the company said in a March 10, 1999, press release.
The press release announced that Swanson had been named president of R.H. Donnelley Directory Services. The error it contained was repeated nearly verbatim in a Jan. 7, 2002, press release, when Swanson was named CEO.
On Monday, the company issued another press release. It said it received an anonymous letter questioning Swanson’s academic credentials.
As a result, it was correcting the record: Swanson attended Minnesota-based St. Cloud, but he never completed his degree.
Seven years is a long time to wait for a correction, but you can usually count on a publisher to fix an error. Donnelley is now the nation’s third-largest publisher of Yellow Pages after its $4.2 billion acquisition of Arapahoe County-based Dex Media in January.
The company, which employs about 1,000 in Colorado, said Swanson did not misrepresent his academic credentials when hired as a salesman 21 years ago.
The company hasn’t fully explained how the error occurred but said it never appeared in any of the company’s regulatory filings.
“This is a regrettable situation for which I accept full responsibility,” Swanson said in Monday’s press release.
In a 2004 interview with trade publication YPTalk, Swanson described his upbringing.
“I came from a small, relatively poor Midwestern family,” he said. “My Dad died when I was in high school so the choices were simple, either make something of yourself or face a lifestyle where you lived with less.”
Despite his lack of a college degree, he earned more than $3 million in compensation last year and commands thousands of employees and billions of dollars in assets.
The company’s board said in the release that it accepts Swanson’s statement regarding the error. The situation, however, is more complicated than that.
R.H. Donnelley officials knew about the error in 2002. They are now correcting it for the public four years later because someone – most likely a disgruntled employee – called them on it in an anonymous letter.
“The company was aware of the error after the (2002) release was issued, and it took steps to make sure the error wasn’t committed again,” R.H. Donnelley spokesman Tyler Gronbach told me on Monday.
Those steps did not include issuing a press release to set the record straight.
Scott Harris, president of the Colorado chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, said people who put out erroneous press releases have an ethical obligation to correct them.
“Anybody working in a corporate communications capacity has got to be committed to truth in communications,” he said. “They have to be obsessed about it.”
Celia Taylor, a law professor at the University of Denver, said it doesn’t appear the company broke any laws. But the error should have been disclosed earlier.
“This was a very questionable decision not to make it public (in 2002),” she said. “The fact that they made it public now makes you question why.”
Earlier this year, RadioShack CEO David Edmondson was forced to resign after claiming college degrees he didn’t have.
Swanson never made such a claim. He just held his lips together as others made it in two press releases and a company website.
With today’s emphasis on corporate ethics and governance, CEOs live under a microscope.
Bob Bearman, an attorney who works on corporate governance issues at Patton Boggs law firm in Denver, said the microscope should now focus on Swanson and the members of Donnelley’s board.
“The board should do more than accept his statement,” Bearman said. “I think the board should investigate this further.”
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to Lewis at denverpostbloghouse.com/lewis, 303-954-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
