Story first appeared in the Traverse City Record-Eagle
Hewlett-Packard Co.’s decision to fire CEO Leo Apotheker after just 11 months and replace him with former eBay chief Meg Whitman is another dizzying turn of the executive merry-go-round at a company whose leadership issues are tearing it apart.
Swapping Apotheker, who has now been ousted from two high-profile CEO jobs in two years, with Whitman, a billionaire who is best known for the decade she spent building eBay and her run for California governor, is a decision designed to stem investor fury over a series of questionable strategy moves.
Whitman’s star-power could be an asset for a company that struggled to gain credibility under Apotheker, who was previously little-known outside of the business software world. HP is no stranger to celebrity CEOs. But Carly Fiorina’s run as leading lady, from 1999 to 2005, ended in shambles.
Despite Whitman’s success at eBay, she is untested when it comes to running a sprawling company such as HP.
One professor commented that she build up a one-trick pony, an online auction site, and she oversaw the growth of the company, but the situation now is where someone needs to come in who has a technological background, and engineering and scientific background, and that that is way outside of her skill set. He added that the decision to change CEO’s so soon points to continued disarray on HP’s board, long a target of critics for the chaos it’s caused at one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and largest companies. Infighting and ego-driven drama has long plagued the board, from revelations in 2006 that HP had spied on directors and journalist to ferret out the source of leaks, to last eyar’s dismissal of CEO Mark Hurd in an ethics scandal.
The profession finished by saying that there’s no question the board is off the rails and that they need a smaller, tighter board that’s committed to the idea of what the company does.
