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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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. "
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
