HP Board Said to Weigh Ousting Apotheker as CEO | Hacker News Reader

HP Board Said to Weigh Ousting Apotheker as CEO

bloomberg.com

80 pointsmvs47 comments

What kind of nonsense is this? It's the board of directors that needs to be dismantled and reorganized. I'm indifferent to HP as a company so it doesn't matter to me what their corporate strategy is. However, if you bring in a new CEO to run your company, how can you fire the guy in less than a year, before that strategy has even been given a chance? He wants to focus on the enterprise software business, and I'm sure thats something he must have told them before he came on board. So then let him do it.

>However, if you bring in a new CEO to run your company, how can you fire the guy in less than a year, before that strategy has even been given a chance?

You can do it when the market has clearly responded to the new strategy by absolutely brutalizing your stock price[1], and when investors are in turn suing because the new strategy flies in the face of everything you've been telling them about the company for the past eighteen months.

[1] http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...

Sure, you can do it but it's just CYA for a mistake of the board's.

I mean presumably they discussed this strategy with Apotheker before bringing him on, right? He didn't just go rogue on them? So they approve the plan, bring him on, and then when people don't like it, jettison him as a scapegoat. Which is fine, don't play in the big leagues if you think life's going to be fair. But the board are at fault here.

> I mean presumably they discussed this strategy with Apotheker before bringing him on, right? He didn't just go rogue on them?

Yes this is a certainty. No CEO could make a 10 billion dollar acquisition without board approval.

Absolutely. And I'm all for investors pushing for the board to resign. They've screwed up massively, and certainly had a hand in it all.

Apotheker going is a good first step, though.

Are we to assume that the new strategy had 0 involvement and approval from the board? Wouldn't such a major shift as this have required the boards approval? The board is almost as responsible as Apotheker.

I always thought the new strategy was flawed either way.

So he's doing a bad job, and their solution is to bring in....Meg Whitman? Seriously?

That's crazy talk.

Agreed I took it as a joke. Honestly I think anyone that you would give the CEO title to at a multi billion dollar company should also be given the trust to pursue the chosen strategy that the board approved.

On the other hand, its a huge turn for HP to sell off the leader of a segment and try software.

The board should fire themselves.

And not just for past incompetence. Let’s say their super-smooth CEO headhunter flies into Toronto and takes me to breakfast.

“What the board wants,” he will say, shooting his cuffs, “is a visionary who will have the courage to take strong action.”

“I see,” I will murmur, swirling the dregs of espresso around the bottom of my cup, eying the way the perfect crema lines the exquisite porcelain. “And am I to understand that if my ‘vision’ doesn’t meet with immediate public acclaim or if I can’t restructure the future of the company AND hit immediate sales targets, you’ll be having breakfast with someone else?”

How is this board going to hire anyone capable of making bets if they fire Leo before his bets could pay off? Who would want a job working for people like this? If they didn’t like his moves, they should have exercised governance and let him know what he could and couldn’t do. If they were doing their jobs and they let him make these kinds of moves, they should support him and not throw him under a bus.

They won't. Instead, they'll call Meg Whitman.

Who would want a job working for people like this?

How much does it pay? Assuming you are guaranteed a year's salary and that that salary is in the $millions range, it doesn't seem like a total waste of time.

I volunteer myself for this job.

http://www.businessinsider.com/soon-to-be-canned-hp-ceo-apot...

I don't get it. Apotheker has already done the damage and realigned the company to his competency, enterprise software. How is firing him going to make things better?

it could get even worse

Enterprise software may be Apotheker's core competency, but I don't think it has been proven this is HP's core competency.

Maybe they expected Apotheker to do more in building the enterprise before he started killing HP's consumer business.

I expect that once they fire him, they'll unravel many of his moves, such as retaining the PC division. WebOS, though, is probably done regardless of what happens at the CEO level.

Someone should snap up the PC division pronto ... in order to sell it back to HP at a 300% markup.

At this point, I'm sure the board would approve it.

Apotheker needs to go. What's happening to HP is a real tragedy and he should be stopped before he destroys the company.

I'm afraid it is much too late. Cringely had an excellent discussion of why and how it is too late: http://www.cringely.com/tag/bill-hewlett/

The same could have been said for Ford, and several other large companies. However, under good management, you'd be surprised how much "bad" can be undone.

HP still brings in a ton of money a year and has a huge market share in several different markets.

It can be fixed, however they have to find someone extraordinary to fix it. Meg Whitman probably isn't quite the right person, she doesn't seem to be the "let's turn this place around" type person.

You're absolutely right, HP right now is in better shape than Apple was in 1996. So, I cannot imagine that it cannot be fixed, but I don't believe it will stay one company.

That's a great article. Thank you for pointing it out.

Cringely had an even better call in February:

http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fi...

He can be a bit of a nutter sometimes but man was this spot on with the Whitman call and Apotheker's hail mary of a huge enterprise acquisition:

"Then there’s Meg Whitman, who expected at this point to have resigned from the HP board to spend all her time running California as governor. But that didn’t happen, so now what is she to do? You can only get so many pedicures. She’ll eventually get around to hip-checking Apotheker and taking his job. Meg can knock back brewskies as well as any man and will probably fill those CEO shoes even better than Apotheker.

I know I am speaking early about this but that’s why I get the big bucks.

There is only one chance Apotheker has to save his job and that’s by buying his old company, SAP. "

It's downright scary how accurate that prediction is.

> American firms have been laying-off their engineering staffs for years. In today’s world of MBA-managed companies, R&D is perceived as not being a good use of money.

I love this guy's writing.

It'll be interesting to see who will pick him up next. He's part of the CEO boys club right?

FYI - even though he "resigned" from within SAP in Sept 2010, everyone I've spoken to said he was politely asked to leave.

The real question is whether the damage Apotheker did can be undone. I think it can, but the window is closing fast. By the time the engineering talent departs to greener pastures, it will be too late.

http://allthingsd.com/20110919/layoffs-at-hps-palm-division/...

They can always hire back those who didn't find better employment.

So - the 80% that did 20% of the work? Maybe not quite that, but... not a great strategy.

Really, no. It will take a lot of effort to undo Apotheker's stupid moves, but it's doable.

The ones that didn't find better employment are likely not the ones at the top of their game.

And seriously, after your employer pulls a stunt like that would you go back?

It depends on what the CEO got.

What bothers me is that it doesn't matter how incompetent Apotheker is and how suicidal his decisions at the helm of HP were, he'll leave it with a lot of money.

If we reward failure like this, how can we expect people to make the effort needed to succeed?

It seems like the beginning of the end was the EDS integration. My guess is that the "Global IT Services" group is behind this "new" strategy (which is the same strategy IBM Global Services implemented more than a decade ago to great success). These companies consume their own young, and watching them hack themselves to pieces is not pretty.

Yup. The EDS integration was a mess. I've spoken to several HP employees about this. Just the mindless switching of e-mails and corporate structure was enough to get them disgruntled.

F'ing pick Bartz.

That would be quite the promotion.

You can oust them all you want now that he wrecked HP. Who brought him and let him do this should take a blame.

HP and Yahoo have the worst board ever. Both of these companies should hire a young product-oriented visionary as their next CEO.

or they should merge into "Hahoo" ... yeah, i know this would solve nothing

No you're right they should merge and they have been planning to for months and after giving $10,000,000 to a marketing firm the board decided on YewPoo.

No, but following around board members (or the CEO) would make a FANTASTIC reality show!

If that person is not a technically and socially genius person, he would be eaten alive quickly by politics.

In particular, they should look in other sources like the startup world.

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman Being Considered for HP CEO Job to Replace Apotheker.

http://allthingsd.com/20110921/former-ebay-ceo-meg-whitman-b...

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