Latest / The Action Catalyst / The Ethical Imperative, with Andrew Cooper (Legal, Business, Leadership, Technology)
Transcript
- 0:00Stephanie Maas: Andy, I'm Stephanie Maas, how are you?
- 0:18Andrew Cooper: I'm well, how are you, Stephanie?
- 0:19Stephanie Maas: I'm good. I'll ask that super open ended
- 0:22question start at the beginning and tell me a little bit about
- 0:25you and your super interesting journey.
- 0:28Andrew Cooper: Sure. So I am from a small town in South
- 0:31Carolina called Walterboro. If you are traveling down 95 you
- 0:36will pass right by it. I had no idea, no concept of what
- 0:40intellectual property was, or even the practice of law, until
- 0:44I was in high school and my my father brought home a movie
- 0:48called separate but equal, and I became exposed to the law and
- 0:52what lawyers can do. And that began kind of my curiosity to
- 0:55the practice of law. I ultimately went to college in
- 0:58Washington, DC and grad school in Atlanta, Georgia, at Emory.
- 1:04While at Emory, I did a few internships, one with the Coca
- 1:08Cola Company, and that's really what started me down the path of
- 1:11IP really exposed me to the concept speed of innovation, and
- 1:17for companies like Coca Cola, Innovation is key to them
- 1:21staying at the head of of their their industry, and it should be
- 1:24something that small business owners think about as well.
- 1:28After leaving Coca Cola, I went to practice law at sharding and
- 1:31bacon in the patent litigation group. Moved from from there to
- 1:34UPS. I was a vice president of UPS, the chief IP council there,
- 1:39and worked for UPS Airlines. So my ups history was about seven
- 1:44years, and then I transitioned from UPS to meta platforms,
- 1:48which is where I am now. And I am the head of patent
- 1:51acquisitions. And I also do technology transactions, open
- 1:55source, and AI work for Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.
- 1:58Stephanie Maas: So not a bad journey from a boy from
- 2:01Walterboro.
- 2:02Andrew Cooper: Yes, Walterboro, South Carolina, population of
- 2:065000.
- 2:07Stephanie Maas: Oh, my gosh. Okay, so waltersboro to Okinawa.
- 2:11Tell me about that.
- 2:13Andrew Cooper: Oh yeah. So I didn't even touch on Okinawa,
- 2:16but yes, when I was nine years old, around nine years old, my
- 2:19dad was stationed in Okinawa Japan, US Marine Corps, and so
- 2:23we moved to Okinawa, Japan. We were there for four years. A lot
- 2:27of my formative kind of relationships and and formative
- 2:32years were there in Japan. We stayed on base, went to
- 2:36Department of Defense schools, and opened my eyes to the
- 2:41importance of working with people from all walks of life,
- 2:45all backgrounds. That core value, I think, in organizations
- 2:50today, is really important. I also talk about this in the
- 2:53book, the importance of building open systems, that's
- 2:57organizations that are able to assimilate information from
- 3:02various centers of innovation and to incorporate those really
- 3:05quickly into products and services. The organizations that
- 3:09we build today in the United States tend to be hierarchical.
- 3:13They tend to be pyramid structures, better
- 3:16organizations. Future organizations should be more
- 3:18like a biological cell, where you have lots of information
- 3:24coming in and being assimilated and worked through and finally
- 3:28incorporated into the organism. And those things that are bad,
- 3:32you kind of kick out, and those things that are good, you make a
- 3:34part of the system. And that really, I think, started my
- 3:38journey and thinking about open systems, diversity and inclusion
- 3:41and how to make organizations stronger.
- 3:44Stephanie Maas: What a very real experience. Now, if you don't
- 3:47mind, I'm going to ask you to kind of educate us a little bit,
- 3:50walk me through this idea of what is intellectual property.
- 3:55Andrew Cooper: Yeah absolutely. So intellectual property is
- 3:58really the intangibles around your business that make it what
- 4:05it is. So when you think about a name brand, human generated
- 4:12content, these are things, anything that comes out of the
- 4:15mind of humans can be protected in intellectual property.
- 4:21Anything that's affixed in a medium. So if you are an artist,
- 4:26and you conceive of an artwork or design or a painting, and you
- 4:31put that onto canvas that can be protected, companies, small
- 4:38businesses, big businesses, they tend to focus on products and
- 4:41services. They tend to focus on what am I selling and protecting
- 4:46what I'm selling, but behind that are rights that need to be
- 4:51protected, and when they're not protected, you run into issues
- 4:55where people can steal and people can copy. So I. IP is
- 5:01integral. It's part and parcel of running a good business. So
- 5:04when I worked at Coca Cola, one of the very first cases that I
- 5:07had to work on was an inventorship dispute, and at
- 5:11issue was a patent a novel gas barrier additive that Coca Cola
- 5:17included inside of its plastic bottles that extends the shelf
- 5:21life of carbonated drinks. So if you come up with this amazing
- 5:27container that can keep sodas really physical for a long
- 5:32period of time, that would be protected by the idea of
- 5:35patents, on the other side of that, you have trademarks, and
- 5:40trademarks are really, really powerful because they indicate
- 5:44source of something really strong. Trademark is Apple, for
- 5:49example. So an apple, it's a fruit, right? But in the context
- 5:53of technology, Apple is a company and a company that makes
- 5:58really great products, and anytime someone sees the Apple
- 6:03logo, though, or they see the word apple on technology, they
- 6:07know where it comes from, and they associate a level of
- 6:11quality with it. So trademarks are really important. And when I
- 6:15was chief IP Counsel of UPS, one of the largest assets that sits
- 6:19on the book of business are the brands. This, the logos, slogans
- 6:25that indicate the source of the good, because there's enormous
- 6:28goodwill that comes along along with it, some lesser known but
- 6:32really, really important forms of IP today include copyright
- 6:37with the advent of artificial intelligence, these AI systems
- 6:42are trained on content, and content is generated primarily
- 6:49by people. And so if you were an author and you write a book,
- 6:54that content is protected by copyright, and so to prevent
- 6:59others from taking it and using it in ways that you would, you
- 7:04know, object to. It's important to protect those things. And
- 7:06companies do these, they create white papers and research and
- 7:10things like that all the time. So it's really important to
- 7:12protect, protect that probably the least known and least used
- 7:17form of intellectual property is, is trade secret. And trade
- 7:21secrets can be so, so powerful their know how their
- 7:25confidential business information that gives you a
- 7:29competitive advantage that other companies don't have. So if you
- 7:33are a small business, and you have a way of collecting data,
- 7:38and you hold that data, and no one else has that specific data
- 7:42set, or, you know, a way of doing something that is better
- 7:47than the way other people do it. That's a form of of knowledge of
- 7:51intellectual property that can be protected.
- 7:54Stephanie Maas: So if you have a sales process that is common
- 7:59practice in your industry that doesn't really fall under IP.
- 8:02Andrew Cooper: That's right.
- 8:03Stephanie Maas: But if you have a process that's unique to your
- 8:06firm or organization...
- 8:08Andrew Cooper: It could be a trade secret, but it's you. You
- 8:10do. You have a process, a sales process, that's different and
- 8:13unique and provides you a competitive advantage that other
- 8:15people don't have, you can protect that as a trade secret.
- 8:19Stephanie Maas: Ok. I know right now it's kind of hot on
- 8:21the docket, this idea of getting rid of non competes and non
- 8:25solicitations.
- 8:26Andrew Cooper: Yes.
- 8:27Stephanie Maas: So you don't typically hear IP being
- 8:29protected and non solicits or non competes. How is that a part
- 8:33of it? Or is it?
- 8:34Andrew Cooper: Yeah, I mean, non competes and non solicitation
- 8:37are more on the side of employment law, they really deal
- 8:42with communications with employees that leave an
- 8:46organization, and what they can and can't say to folks who
- 8:50remain inside that organization. So from a non solicit
- 8:53perspective, you can't go and try to pull or entice other
- 8:58employees from where you're leaving. On the non compete
- 9:01side, there's, it's adjacent to IP in the sense that the idea is
- 9:07you have developed some, some level of knowledge that is
- 9:12unique to an industry. And if you were to leave a company in
- 9:18the same industry and go to another company that is a
- 9:21competitor. You may take that knowledge with you into the
- 9:25competitor shop and use it in a way that is is detrimental to
- 9:30the company that you're leaving. So there's, it's it's adjacent
- 9:33to IP because it does deal with know how. And there are some
- 9:36rules about what you can restrict from the perspective of
- 9:40a person that is covered by a non compete so information that
- 9:45is derived from working within an organization, just as a
- 9:50result of you being there, you've developed a level of
- 9:54expertise. Typically, you're not supposed to prevent someone from
- 9:58leveraging the. Expertise in order to earn a living,
- 10:03especially if it's in like a market that is that's really
- 10:06small, like a duopoly. Let's going back to the coke example.
- 10:08You get Coke and Pepsi very large competitors, a non compete
- 10:13that is so broad that would prevent any Coca Cola executive
- 10:16from moving over to PepsiCo and not being able to leverage just
- 10:20their generalized skills as a as a lawyer or a scientist or a
- 10:24salesperson, those would probably run afoul and, of
- 10:27course, this is not legal advice, you know, you'd have to
- 10:29check with with the lawyer. You know, my experience has been
- 10:32those typically don't, don't fly, but you can narrowly tailor
- 10:37non competes in a way, as long as they are, you know, short in
- 10:41duration and specific to, for example, the work that an
- 10:45individual has done while they were there. So if you are a an
- 10:48amazing research scientist that came up with some some novel,
- 10:52you know, containers that extend the life of sodas, you could
- 10:57potentially prevent that person from going to a direct
- 11:00competitor and working on the exact same stuff. They can still
- 11:03work as a scientist, they can work on other projects, but
- 11:06typically you could, you can narrowly tailor that way to your
- 11:09point. There been a push to change non competes at a federal
- 11:16level. Some companies have gone too far with how they have
- 11:21sought to restrict the work of employees. And so it's the jury
- 11:27is still out.
- 11:28Stephanie Maas: Ok, I want to talk about the book, The Ethical
- 11:32Imperative, Leading With Conscious to Shape the Future of
- 11:35Business. Give me, from your perspective, kind of where this
- 11:39came from, what the intent was.
- 11:41Andrew Cooper: Sure. So in 2018 I was the vice president,
- 11:45General Counsel of UPS Airlines, moved to Louisville, Kentucky,
- 11:49and started the role. I was a position as, hey, this is an
- 11:53opportunity for you to take on senior leadership large
- 11:56organization, 20,000 employees. And then covid happened, and so
- 12:02I began began journaling about the challenges that my my team
- 12:06were going through, and strategies for helping them to
- 12:09regain and retain high performance through that crisis.
- 12:13And I think it's crisis for just about everyone. And so as I was
- 12:17doing research into like strategies that executives had
- 12:21used in the past. What I realized was that there are
- 12:24really four things, four moral imperatives, that any leader has
- 12:30to really focus on, and that's the first is to work quickly, to
- 12:36move with speed. If you look at organizations prior to the 1970s
- 12:42a lot of those organizations, and they were run by Silent
- 12:46Generation, Greatest Generation, those organizations tended to
- 12:51divest power, closer to managers, closer to frontline
- 12:56supervisors, allowed employees to take a more active role in
- 13:01the decisions of the life of the organization. And so that's
- 13:04where this concept of of speed as a moral imperative comes
- 13:07from. It actually relates to our topic of intellectual property,
- 13:11because the rate of innovation of an organization says a lot
- 13:15about its speed. Slow organizations tend to be less
- 13:19innovative. They tend to not engender or encourage the types
- 13:25of ideas from their employees that allow them to be avant
- 13:29garde, to allow them to be at the front of the pack, and it
- 13:33shows in the number of patents that they file many other ways.
- 13:37The second moral imperative is really to lead with inspiration
- 13:41to connect the work that we are doing to some benefit to the
- 13:47world. That is a goal that that we can all share in
- 13:52organizations like Coca Cola and their work on on water
- 13:56replenishment organizations like bombas and their work on
- 14:00providing socks to the homeless. These are critical pieces of the
- 14:07employee engagement puzzle. Really, it's a puzzle that we
- 14:10have to solve. And so when I was working through the pandemic, I
- 14:15realized that by being a part of Operation warp speed, that was
- 14:19the Trump administration's push to deliver medicines and
- 14:22vaccines around the world. It gave our employees a North Star.
- 14:26It was something that said, Hey, we are part of a movement to
- 14:30save the world. The whole idea, the slogan, it's a patient, not
- 14:34a package, was really motivating during that time. The third
- 14:37moral imperative is community investment. Again, going back to
- 14:40organizations prior to the the 1970s what we found were
- 14:45organizations that invested in communities heavily. So Hershey,
- 14:51Pennsylvania would not be a place without Hershey.
- 14:54Bentonville, Arkansas would not be a place without Walmart, Coca
- 14:58Cola, even Atlanta. Not be the type of place it was without
- 15:02Coca Cola and Chick fil A and some of the other companies that
- 15:04have really opened up their their organizations to
- 15:08addressing needs of communities. And what we find is that
- 15:11organizations that identify a place that they want to
- 15:16transform and go about a strategic vision in doing that
- 15:20if, even if it's public, or even if it's a public, private
- 15:23engagement or just a private movement, doesn't matter. The
- 15:28outcomes of those communities tend to be better than, for
- 15:31example, places like Walterboro, South Carolina, where there's
- 15:34been economic distress for for for a long, long time. So the
- 15:39the Community Investment becomes a really critical piece. And
- 15:42then finally, the last imperative is openness. Building
- 15:45open systems is really what inspires organizations, people
- 15:50within organizations, to do their best work when they
- 15:52believe that even if there are disappointments, I know that
- 15:57there's a level of meritocracy built in. I am being heard in
- 16:00the organization that the leaders care about me in the
- 16:05organization, these key pillars of being an organization that's
- 16:10open makes employees perform better. What I have found, just
- 16:16as an employee, sometimes pair, can be a sense that we are
- 16:21creating walls between each other, where walls don't need to
- 16:27exist. And so when we segment ourselves, rather than creating
- 16:32the places where we can connect, there's a different feeling. So
- 16:37building bridges, opening doors, creating places where people can
- 16:41connect and embrace shared humanity become really
- 16:45important, and I think a lot of it stems from my experience
- 16:48through the pandemic. Because the truth is, it seemed like the
- 16:52world changed, but the world didn't change. I think we
- 16:55changed. I think people, since we were all going through the
- 16:59same thing at the same time everywhere, people started
- 17:01asking questions like, do you really care about me? Does this
- 17:03organization care about me? I know the things that are really
- 17:07important to me now they're things like, like family and and
- 17:10so we've just we had this re complete reset on the things
- 17:13that matter. And so what I'm bringing forward is that that
- 17:17caring has to be first and foremost, and when people, when
- 17:21you lead with caring, when you lead with systems that are
- 17:24welcoming, that create connections rather than create
- 17:27barriers, you tend to have more effective and high performing
- 17:31teams.
- 17:32Stephanie Maas: Yes, that's huge.
- 17:34Andrew Cooper: I do want to go back a little bit to
- 17:36operationalizing some of the things that we talked about from
- 17:39an intellectual property side. How do I go about like best
- 17:43practices in securing my intellectual property rights? A
- 17:47few pointers, a few strategies for small and medium sized
- 17:50businesses, first conduct audits, regularly review and
- 17:54document the IP assets that are available to you and talk about
- 18:00patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, even designs,
- 18:03right? So patents, common utility and design, flavors,
- 18:05designs. You know how something looks, so look at your talk to
- 18:10your team again within the context of an open system, bring
- 18:14people together regional whiteboarding sessions actually
- 18:18going to folks who you know within your organization that
- 18:21have great ideas and say, Hey, we want to just sit down and put
- 18:25some of these ideas on paper. That's the first step in going
- 18:29about securing those rights that you're looking to secure. And do
- 18:34it regularly, like if it's quarterly or yearly, that kind
- 18:37of thing, and keep a book. Sometimes in the old days, when
- 18:41I started practicing law, people would ask, Hey, where's your
- 18:43where's your IP book, you know, where's your patent book, where?
- 18:46And it's just a record of those ideas that have been captured.
- 18:51The second thing is to to register your your intellectual
- 18:55property. Now, there's some, there's some IP that you have
- 18:58protection from the minute that it's created. So copyright, for
- 19:03example, you create a story. Say you're a content company, and
- 19:07you have story writers the minute that they put pen to
- 19:11paper and they create that story. There is copyright
- 19:13protection, but there are other ways of registering that IP. You
- 19:18can register a copyright once a work is completed with the
- 19:21copyright office can file a patent application to protect an
- 19:25invention. These are things that you should do because they
- 19:29create enhanced protections for you. Sometimes they are notice
- 19:34protections that puts the world on notice that you are the owner
- 19:38of this thing. And sometimes there are there enhanced damages
- 19:42protection. So if someone does steal your IP or copies your
- 19:47work, you are able to get, you know, sometimes, three times the
- 19:51amount of damages as a result of you just registering your your
- 19:55intellectual property. I thirdly, I really encourage
- 19:59small. Businesses to engage in NDA practice, and that's non
- 20:03disclosure agreements. Create a standard non disclosure
- 20:07agreement and use it routinely. Put NDA provisions in your
- 20:11employee agreements when they onboard and ensure that they are
- 20:15they're time bound, and they're reasonable. They relate to the
- 20:18work that the person is doing, not just with employees, but
- 20:21also with vendors. I should also say when you have vendors,
- 20:23they're coming onto your property. Make sure vendors have
- 20:26NDAs, because you know your vendors walking through they you
- 20:29know people might have confidential information sitting
- 20:32on, uh, tables or desks, and it's very easy these days to
- 20:36just snap a picture with your cell phone of confidential
- 20:39information. So make sure that your NDAs are in place and are
- 20:42protecting your information in that way, monitor and enforce
- 20:46your IP rights. An IP right is no good if it is not protected
- 20:52and enforced. So if you have copyrights, ensure that you are
- 20:58sending cease and desist letters when you believe someone is
- 21:00infringing, that you are engaging with competent counsel
- 21:04that can negotiate either the takedown of things that are
- 21:08infringing, ensure that you are looking in policing. Because
- 21:11what ends up happening is there's a theory in the law that
- 21:15you know if you don't protect your rights, you lose your
- 21:17rights. So if you, for example, know that someone is infringing
- 21:22your trademark and you don't do anything to enforce it. Well, if
- 21:25you go for a sufficient period of time without doing it, you
- 21:27may lose some protections. So really look at monitoring
- 21:32enforcement programs. The last two things, I would say, one,
- 21:36educate your employees. So training employees on the
- 21:40importance of IP and best practices in protecting it can
- 21:44go a really long way to ensuring that you have a strong brand in
- 21:48the minds of consumers, and that you're also keeping the value
- 21:52high on your products and your confidential information, your
- 21:57data, your systems. We at UPS when I was working there, had
- 22:02routine trainings on this stuff. It also goes a long way in just
- 22:06ensuring that people know when they have created something
- 22:10that's worthy of protection. And I've seen this many times.
- 22:12You've got people out in the field, they're working in an
- 22:15operating environment, a warehouse or a factory or
- 22:17something, they come up with some fix to a problem that is
- 22:22just a practical fix, because they are, you know, necessities
- 22:25of mother of all inventions, they have created a unique,
- 22:28efficient way of doing it, and nobody knows about it, except
- 22:32two or three managers inside that that factory, and it could
- 22:36be a solution that every factory would could use and create
- 22:40economies of scale, and we just don't, we just don't know about
- 22:43it, because employees aren't educated in like who to contact
- 22:47when they come up with something that's that's good, like that.
- 22:49And I guess the the last thing I would say is implement security
- 22:52measures, use, use technical measures like encryption and
- 22:57access controls to safeguard your IP and your data. This is
- 23:03really important when it comes to trade secrets, because trade
- 23:07secrets, if they are, if they're not protected, they can, they
- 23:10can be lost. Typically, if you lose a trade secret, the damages
- 23:16are so incalculable, they can't be they really can't be
- 23:19recovered. Because the idea is, only a few people know the trade
- 23:23secret, and if more people know the secret, then it's really,
- 23:26it's invaluable anymore. You know, though, the ultimate trade
- 23:29secret many people think about is, like the Coca Cola formula
- 23:31for Coca Cola, right ups. We also had, we had a system called
- 23:36Orion. It's the reason UPS package cars only turn make
- 23:39right turns it so it's there's there.....
- 23:41Stephanie Maas: Are you allowed to talk about that? Did you sign
- 23:43an NDA?
- 23:43Andrew Cooper: No, I cannot tell you why, but there's really
- 23:49important safeguards that you can put in place to protect that
- 23:53kind of stuff. Creating processes that block access to
- 23:58things that are critical to the organization are important for
- 24:02the value of the IP itself and your ability to recover if
- 24:06anything happens as a result.
- 24:07Stephanie Maas: Super helpful. This is fascinating. Does it
- 24:10get old to you?
- 24:11Andrew Cooper: No, it doesn't. It doesn't get old because every
- 24:14single day, people are creating new and amazing things. That is
- 24:18our nature as human beings. We are just so we're tinkerers by
- 24:23nature, and as a result, I will always have a job. So I'm very
- 24:28grateful for that. But we are also, we are also very greedy as
- 24:32humans. We want to protect those things that we that we create.
- 24:36We want to generate value from them. And so that also is a
- 24:40motivator. Many, I know, many companies that provide cash
- 24:43incentives to their employees when they come up with great
- 24:45ideas or they get a patent. There's also the ability to
- 24:50generate revenue as a result of of just having intellectual
- 24:54property. So there are companies that do nothing but license the
- 24:57things that they have created. So there's. The licensing
- 25:00revenue that come from, can come from it. And of course, you know
- 25:03from a trademark perspective, just the mere fact that you know
- 25:06there are brands, if you see their logo, you know that it's
- 25:09going to be a huge check associated with it. Creators
- 25:13across all industries are starting to realize brand value
- 25:17has been really, really important, and something that
- 25:20can bring a lot of financial reward. So I continue to be
- 25:25enamored with the field that I'm in with. The revolution in AI,
- 25:30we are seeing a new burst of creativity and innovation
- 25:33happening, and that is also very interesting to see how things
- 25:36are developing and changing in such rapid succession. There's a
- 25:39book by a man named Azim Azar. It's called the exponential age,
- 25:43and he talks about how we are moving so fast that we will that
- 25:48society will almost be unrecognizable. 1520, years from
- 25:51now, we'll look back and say, My gosh, do you remember when we
- 25:54didn't have tires that don't have air in them? And do you
- 25:58remember when we had cars that were combustion? We don't have
- 26:00cars with combustion anymore. I mean, heck, I can remember back
- 26:02when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I had, you know, one of
- 26:04those T floor set TVs with the the antennas sitting on top, and
- 26:09everything was kind of analog and grainy. And now, you know,
- 26:12my computer screen is, is three times, is efficient and clearer.
- 26:17And, you know, it's just things that are things are changing
- 26:19rapidly for us, and that also just makes the practice of IP
- 26:23law very exciting.
- 26:25Stephanie Maas: Well, your excitement and passion for it
- 26:27definitely comes through. This has been super interesting.
- 26:31Thank you so much.
- 26:32Andrew Cooper: Absolutely. It's my pleasure, and thank you very
- 26:35much.