HP Board Said to Weigh Ousting Apotheker as CEO

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-21/hp-s-board-is-said-to-weigh-ousting-apotheker-after-less-than-year-as-ceo.html

by mvs • 15 years ago

80 47 15 years ago

gentle2• 15 years ago

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

gvb• 15 years ago

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/

joeblossom• 15 years ago

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.

gentle2• 15 years ago

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

Steko• 15 years ago

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. "

DrHankPym• 15 years ago

> 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.

sunchild• 15 years ago

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.

mbesto2• 15 years ago

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.

gamble• 15 years ago

The board should fire themselves.

raganwald• 15 years ago

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.

alexqgb• 15 years ago

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

jrockway• 15 years ago

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.

vailripper• 15 years ago

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

RexRollman• 15 years ago

That's crazy talk.

redorb• 15 years ago

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.

mbesto2• 15 years ago

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.

chugger2• 15 years ago

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

bauchidgw• 15 years ago

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

ilovedelphi2• 15 years ago

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.

jeffool• 15 years ago

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

hello_moto• 15 years ago

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

yuhong• 15 years ago

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

siglesias• 15 years ago

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?

felipemnoa• 15 years ago

it could get even worse

jobu• 15 years ago

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.

ternaryoperator• 15 years ago

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.

chugger2• 15 years ago

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

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

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

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.

ghshephard• 15 years ago

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

rbanffy4• 15 years ago

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

georgekv• 15 years ago

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.

dr_• 15 years ago

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.

commandar2• 15 years ago

>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...

jbooth• 15 years ago

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.

pedalpete• 15 years ago

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.

desireco42• 15 years ago

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

jmount• 15 years ago

F'ing pick Bartz.

Raphael• 15 years ago

That would be quite the promotion.

HP Board Said to Weigh Ousting Apotheker as CEO

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