Plaintiffs’ Case, Cont’d
Orange County is blessed to have a tight-knit business community that not only works well together to promote commerce but also bands together to support charitable causes. In fact, business people are the backbone of nonprofit activity here.
That makes it much more painful when the kind of not-unusual business dispute that inevitably occurs in life spills over and affects a wonderful institution like the Orange County Performing Arts Center. And, that is exactly what has happened with the recent public disclosure of a lawsuit that I and other members of the arts center board are engaged in against two of our largest donors and fellow business leaders, Broadcom Corp. founders Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli.
The substance of the dispute is really not important to anyone but the participants. When the lawsuit was filed in January, I informed Nicholas and Samueli about it through their attorney in an effort to make them understand it was a matter of business and wasn’t personal. For more than six weeks, all of us involved in the suit worked on the boards of arts center and other organizations, saw each other at social events and conducted life as if nothing special had happened.
Recently someone chose to take the story to the news media and in doing so intentionally sowed the seeds of ill will. Only then did anyone show evidence of hurt feelings or the inability to get along. Sadly, Samueli and Nicholas have chosen to resign from the arts center board, and the newspapers are atwitter with what they see as a schism among members of the arts community.
I want to take this opportunity to say this: Nicholas and Samueli have had a major impact on this community, not just at the Performing Arts Center but at UCI, South Coast Repertory and many other nonprofit institutions. They have become role models for other high-tech entrepreneurs.
Lawsuits happen in business. They do not have to be divisive. The overlap between business leadership and charitable leadership is strong in Orange County. The current dispute among just a few of those leaders is small in the overall scheme of things. None of us should let it become otherwise.
Thomas Tierney
