QUIXTAR: Orrin Woodward is a "Mis-leader"

Original Source

Mis-leader
March 10th, 2008 @ 1:00 pm ET…

Terminated IBO Orrin Woodward’s recent decision to ask for contributions to his “legal defense fund” was such a low point that we cannot let it pass without comment.

Since his termination for unacceptable business practices last August, Mr. Woodward has done nothing but confirm, repeatedly, our decision to let him go.

We think that any objective person viewing the record would agree that:

He has abused the legal system by filing multiple, frivolous lawsuits that have been dismissed with prejudice.
He has abused business relationships of people he partnered with for more than a decade by repeatedly violating his contract commitments to respect the Line of Sponsorship of others.
He has abused his fiduciary responsibilities to his trade association by inducing others to disgorge confidential information and violate court orders.
Now, true enough: in response to those abuses, we threw him out of the company, the IBOAI threw him out of their boardroom, and judges threw his cases out of court.

So why drag our dispute back out into the light?

Because we believe that Mr. Woodward now is using distortions and untruths to justify bad ethical decisions he made – and attempting to get others to pay for his own ill-conceived lawsuits and mistakes. He is putting his downlines at legal risk without telling them. And he is attempting to raid Quixtar organizations, in further violation of his contract.

We can’t tell people how to react to these behaviors, other than to advise our business owners to contact Rules or Sales immediately if there are approaches made to your groups.

But in the face of a new round of misrepresentations from Mr. Woodward, we can – yet again –set the record straight.

So we will.

Mis-leader, in court

The original dispute: We terminated Mr. Woodward in August 2007 after he repeatedly refused to clean up his abusive business practices. Well before his disciplinary meeting approached, Mr. Woodward had hired a big-ticket law firm and ordered them to draft a federal lawsuit. He then filed that lawsuit within hours of his termination.

Mr. Woodward claims filing a lawsuit accusing us of operating an illegal pyramid was a negotiating tactic, part of a spiritually motivated attempt to reconcile our differences. It would be more accurate to say it was a premeditated attack on our business model, designed to drive every IBO in the US out of business and into the arms of a new venture he was planning.

Mr. Woodward and his legal team then coordinated an astonishing blitz of more than one dozen lawsuits against our company filed across the country. The timing and language of the suits were nearly identical, Mr. Woodward’s associates seemed to know instantly about all of them, and the same attorneys seemed to showed up in case after case.

Mr. Woodward claims the blitz was a spontaneous, grass-roots uprising. How he can say that in the face of all evidence to the contrary is beyond belief. We’re sure his behind-the-scenes communications tell a very different story.

And Mr. Woodward fueled his litigation attack with confidential documents belonging to the IBOAI, a trade association where Mr. Woodward had been a board member. Mr. Woodward’s associates stonewalled court orders to return the documents, which did not belong to them, and which they had sworn – twice! – to keep confidential.

Mr. Woodward claims he had nothing to do with the documents. The fact is, it seems obvious his lawyers used those purloined documents to write their lawsuits. In fact, a judge has now held Woodward associate Billy Florence in contempt of court for violating a court order related to those documents.

The result: Mr. Woodward’s federal lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice. Most of the spam lawsuits have been dismissed or evaporated. (And a recent Georgia legal document circulating online was never entered. Therefore it does not carry legal force – a fact Mr. Woodward’s associates, unsurprisingly, failed to point out.) Instead, courts have ordered Mr. Woodward and his associates to abide by their contacts and arbitrate. Mr. Florence has defied a court of law. Mr. Woodward’s strategy of legal harassment and attack is failing, miserably and utterly.

Mr. Woodward is a businessman. He knows what contracts mean and why he signs them. He could have honored his contract, followed the rules that govern moving to a competitive business. But he chose not to play by the rules, chose to initiate this massive legal fight, chose to jeopardize the businesses of thousands of IBOs.

Mr. Woodward could still choose to pay for the fights he picked. To watch him leave his money in the bank – and ask others with less to foot the bill for his poor decisions – well, call it what you want, but just don’t call it “leadership.”

Mis-leader, in the field

And a final thought: When we choose to fight, we choose to fight to protect the businesses that Quixtar and our IBOs have built.

But when Mr. Woodward and his associates encouraged mass resignations from our company, they did so knowing they would devastate the businesses of a number of Quixtar business owners who refused to be bullied into following him.

When Mr. Woodward encouraged those resignations, he knew some those who did follow him would lose income when they left Quixtar, and that he had no way to replace that income for them. But that did not stop him from encouraging those same people to spend hundreds of dollars replacing his lost income at rallies in Louisville and St. Louis.

When Mr. Woodward encouraged people to follow him to a business with “Wal-Mart pricing”… and then instead abruptly threw in his lot with a company that offers only a handful of ultra-premium priced products… he knew he would lose more of the people who followed him once and for all.

And when Mr. Woodward permits forays into our sales groups, seeking to split more people away, he knows that he is encouraging people to break rules and court orders and put themselves at risk. Worse yet, he does so knowing he’s leading people down a path of promises that lead to disappointment.

Mr. Woodward would no doubt find some historical figure to justify his actions.

But we cannot.

Because when we look at Mr. Woodward’s actions over the past six months, all we see is a manipulative person, abusing the principles of values-driven leadership that our business tries to teach. Put plainly, his recent actions are enough to make all of us who care about helping people build businesses more committed than ever to protecting IBOs from this kind of malicious manipulation.