Whitman Expected to Get HP CEO Nod After Markets Close (opens in new tab)

Imagine if you worked for BigCo, and one day your boss says to you, "You're fired... and we're also taking back your stock options and severance pay."

Because that's what you're proposing doing to a CEO. Yeah, they're rich and proportionally more of their pay is comprised of non-salary items. Oh well. Yeah, you don't like what HP executive management did to the company. I agree, it sucks. But in the real world, people negotiate trading work for pay, and you can't just yank it back because you didn't like the work.

(Unless you negotiate some provision to do so, which some companies do. But not HP.)

The theory is, and I"m not necessarily a believer in it, that if you take a CEO job, it's often the last job you ever take.

CEO's like sports coaches are hired to be fired. It's really rare for a CEO to leave on their own terms.

We like to think of CEO's going from one company to another, but in truth once you've been a CEO and fired you don't often get that chance again.

The large severance pay is supposed to reflect the "fact" that you probably won't get a job like this again.

I agree completely, which is why I don't own HP stock. From my perspective it shouldn't really bother me unless I'm an HP shareholder and it's my money they're playing with. If the company wants to waste tens of millions cycling through a new CEO every year or two -- so be it. It'll be that much easier for a competitor to eat their lunch. If the shareholders cared enough they would throw out the board of directors.

Really have to ponder why Whitman would take this job given the probability of being fired next year no matter what happens...

Exactly. But we should wait and see how this plays out. Maybe they realized that strategy was a mistake to begin with and are trying to correct it. He hasn't necessarily been turned into a scapegoat yet.

Yea, exactly, they should have just bought this http://entrosys.com/

I once got a chance to talk to Meg when I worked at eBay. After the, very brief, interaction I dubbed her "Queen Margaret" as the look on her face suggested that rabble like me shouldn't be seen, at least by the aristocracy.

Also, across the street from the eBay HQ in Campbell there was a restaurant that had failed and Hooters wanted to open a location in it's place. Meg fought Hooters for nearly two years.

Good luck HP, you're going to need it.

Whitman spent $144 million of her own money campaigning.

She is the type of person that feels $144 million in TV Ads is enough to buy public support rather than $100 million in charity and non profit work to build an image. I don't imagine her leadership of HP to be any different.

I expect her attitude to be "We can buy customers" rather than "We can earn respect and attract customers."

Meg Whitman is, as far as I can tell, an incompetent moron.

Examine the skype acquisition: the way I understand, Meg/ebay acquired skype without buying the backing technology / p2p tech which remained owned by Joltid / Niklas / Janus. Ebay then went on to not pay some of the earnouts of the skype acquisition which I'm sure made Niklas / Janus think highly of ebay [1]. It literally boggles the mind that she could be stupid enough to acquire a company without owning the backing tech; it would be like a company buying an OS that came without ownership of the kernel. Niklas / Janus then used this to earn a bunch more money when ebay went on to sell skype.

For some background: http://gigaom.com/2009/09/01/ebay-skype-sale/

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2007/10/01/skype-ceo-zennstrom-steps-d...

Well - once they've gone down the wrong path, realizing it and making a correction should reflect better on them (although it still shows poor predictive skills IMHO).

He wasn't even that successful. He only got to the point of "maybe we should spin off the PC division, or do something else with it" without actually announcing (or maybe even having!) a plan to do so.

is the Autonomy acquisition finalized yet? it seems like maybe this is a signal that HP will attempt to refocus on its consumer products?

Killing WebOS and undoing the Palm acquisition was the best thing Apotheker did for HP.

WebOS features some impressive application design on top of a turkey of an OS. HP shouldn't have tried to ship any of that junk.

  what a waste of time his entire tenure has been

The stock has gone down 47%, and he will walk away with approximately thirty million dollars. “Waste of time” doesn’t quite capture my thoughts about his tenure.

http://allthingsd.com/20110921/what-will-leo-apotheker-walk-...

Simply because someone thinks that one particular woman might not be great at one particular job does not make them a sexist. Also, I don't think success at Ebay and Google are exactly comparable. Ebay is a dual-sided market. Once they became dominant it'd be very hard to unseat them. In this environment it's very possible Ebay was able to succeed in spite of Meg Whitman not because of her. She made some very good moves like acquiring PayPal and some very bad moves like acquiring Skype. I don't have much of an opinion on how Meg Whitman would do in the role, but I think HP's board royally screwed up and will not make the job easier. They hired Apotheker, approved of his acquisitions, and never gave his strategy a chance to work before deciding to fire the guy. HP's board needs to be replaced.

People think she's unqualified to run HP precisely because of her track record. During her tenure at eBay she made many terrible decisions that did long lasting damage and ultimately weakened the company. Furthermore, she suffocated any innovation within the company. HP was once a true engineer's company, it had the reputation of being one of the best places to work as an engineer, hands down. The board of HP needs to hire someone that can rekindle that spirit, and Meg Whitman inspires nothing but loathing in a huge swath of the population. Her gender has nothing to do with it.