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Larry Ellison Rips HP Board a New One
theodp writes "No stranger himself to sexual harassment allegations, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has denounced HP's directors for forcing the resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd. 'The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago,' Ellison wrote. For now, it seems that Rupert Murdoch is also standing by Hurd, who sits on News Corp's Board of Directors and its Corporate Governance Committee. Less likely to survive the scandal is Hurd's relationship with HP General Counsel Mike Holston, who accepted Hurd's signed separation agreement after leading an investigation into Hurd's actions, which Holston told the NY Times 'showed a profound lack of judgment.' Quite a change from just last year, when Hurd and Holston teamed up to get their daughters' elite prep school a state-of-the-art HP Data Center."
Is this how "corruption on a massive scale" is spelled, nowadays?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This is the board that hired Carly, setting a new standard for "worst personnel decision". Compared to that, this doesn't even make a blip on the radar.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
More common than most people realize. And thanks to feminists running around claiming that no woman has ever lied about being raped or sexually harassed, there is pretty much a presumption of guilt now for any such accusation, even if it's in the midst of a nasty divorce/custody case or if the victim has a clear financial gain in making an accusation. Just look at how those poor bastards in the Duke Lacrosse case were publicly crucified by the likes of Gloria Alred and Nancy Grace (who never even had the decency to apologize after the case fell apart). Without decent attorneys, those guys would probably be in prison now (instead of the piece-of-shit prosecutor who railroaded them for his own political gain).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Everyone is focusing on the sexual aspects of this. If you read through HP's statements, they fired him because he falsified expense reports (lied) so he could give money to the woman involved for *consulting* services that appeared to have either never been performed or were done so poorly as to be worthless (stole).
HP canned his butt for stealing, plan and simple. It would be idiotic to keep a thief on as your CEO, especially in this political, companies are the root of all evil climate. HP's board did their job in this case.
If Larry Ellison backs Hurd then he must be his kind of scum - fearless and inventive. Takes one to know one.
That is all.
He was a superstar manager. If HP's financial performance suffers without Hurd, they could lose tens of billions of dollars in market cap. If that happens I have to think that investors are going to question whether that $20k was worth it.
I don't disagree that he has been an amazing manager at HP, helping to turn things around after the mess that was Carly Fiorina.
However, how much corruption is too much to overlook? Where do you draw that line? He falsified records to get expenses paid out to himself and/or this woman for $20k, and when caught red-handed, offered to pay it back. Ok, but what if he wasn't caught? Would he have kept doing it? Would he have done it with some other woman? What happens if he wasn't caught until the total was in the millions? Would that have still been ok, because a couple million is still less than tens of billions in market cap?
What is the value of corporate officers acting honestly no matter what?
Today you'd get thrown in jail for making that recording.
To be fair, at one point it was pretty standard to put the accuser in a case like that more on trial than the accused.
Things have swung too far in the opposite direction, now, but you have to understand these things in context -- society's trying to find an appropriate equilibrium.
Does anyone know if there is hard evidence (heh) proving this guy's guilt? It would be a real shame for this to be a false accusation that gives this man $12 million in cash and $30 to 40 million in stock options...
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
See, you can't even point it out without getting a flamebait mod.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
People simply do not understand things at the top of the political/business world. None of this was about what he did, falsified what, or expensed whatever. This was about someone else wanting him out. Someone powerful wants the job, or doesn't like the guy, period.
People at this level are in constant competition with others to keep their jobs, and have to force others out. If you make yourself politically weak by doing some jackoff thing like this, it makes it easier to take you out. Here, someone did. They managed to overlook the data center for his kids school, for chrissake. He just had more juice at that time.
The firing wasn't about the amount of the falsification. $20k is indeed chump change for a bazillion-dollar executive. But once you let the CEO get away with blatantly falsifying expense accounts, you've now made theft from the company an acceptable practice. How do you now justify firing an employee for the same thing? Why is it okay for a CEO to steal $20k, but not okay for a peon to do the same? Condoning this behavior is simply not the right thing to do, and can trigger long-term problems with morale and the company culture which can lead to massive losses (and possibly company failure) years down the road.
I'd say there is a 100% chance that any peon that stole $20k would be escorted out of the building by security (and isn't going to receive any cushy severance package either) and possibly brought up on charges.
I applaud HP's board for doing the right thing here and demonstrating the executives are held to the same ethical rules as front-line employees. Yes, it hurt. Yes, Hurd was an otherwise-excellent CEO. Yes, this has cost a lot of short-term pain to the stock price. But some things just aren't right, and churning up $20k in fraudulent expense accounts is one of them. (Wiretapping journalists to find out their sources is another, which HP found out the hard way.) I think HP will be a stronger company down the road as a result.
SirWired
Larry Ellison runs Oracle like his own personal fiefdom. He's very good at what he does, but he's the last person on earth I'd ask for advice on executive boundaries. His attitude fits in very well with Oracle's corporate culture (which he built.) It would be a disaster for HP.
Oracle's board would never fire him for such a thing (could they even do so?), but HP's board was quite right in tossing Hurd to the curb.
HP's board made a tough choice, but in the end, I think it will have proven to be the correct one.
SirWired
Comment removed based on user account deletion
HP has been headed by complete imbeciles for years now. The legendarily bad Carly was just the first headliner.
I'm not too close to his work, but Mark Hurd was actually the first HP CEO in years that didn't seem to be a completely vacuous idiot. By not immediately firing every engineer and outsourcing design to wikipedia, Mark Hurd was the best HP CEO since the 90's. He seemed like he wanted to lead a business that actually made things. It was shocking.
While there are many people that can competently fill the shoes of the CEO at HP, if history is any indication the board will elect Mister Bean.
The ______ Agenda
The Islamic world wasn't the whole of his examples, just an afterthought thrown in there.
Look at any Digg story about rape. Or any article that drifts into whether abortion should be legal in cases of rape.
Then there are stories like this http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10211/1076338-455.stm where every mention of rape is assumed to actually be consensual sex (in other words, she asked for it).
Or these pamphlets that aim to spread the message everywhere http://jezebel.com/5482688/you-make-men-want-to-be-sinful-blaming-the-victim-religious-pamphlet-edition
Or http://jezebel.com/5478360/she-knew-what-would-happen-if-she-started-drinking-blaming-the-victim-princeton-edition
This shows that it isn't just a small nutball collective: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251040/Rape-Its-fault-victims-say-50-women.html?ITO=1490&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+dailymail/home+(Home+|+Mail+Online)
The boys aren't to blame because she drank a bit: http://current.com/1db6i4c
Here's what rapists think about it: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/04/15/why-dont-we-accept-victim-blaming-from-rapists/
There are a whole host of weirder cases, too, that imply that rape victims actually gave consent. Remember how Whoopi Goldberg ranting about how Roman Polanski's drugging and raping an unconscious child wasn't really rape? I'm not sure what she was getting at, but if it wasn't rape then it stands to reason that Whoopi thought something about the unconscious, drugged girl gave consent to Polanski.
But if you can produce mainstream commentators...
You are moving goalposts and putting them someplace strange and unnecessary. This isn't about political commentators blaming the victim, it's about members of the public blaming the victim, all the time. Fair enough that you can find a lone person with an insane definition of anything, but this is hardly a rare viewpoint.
Actually, a drunk man who has sex with a sober woman could press rape charges. However, this assumes that (a) upon waking, the man feels that he has been wronged and (b) the man actually chooses to press rape charges. We live in a society that assumes that men want to have sex with women, no matter their state of mind, and that further presumes that a man cannot be raped by a woman, and any man that does make such a claim is a pussy. So it is understandable that so few cases are prosecuted.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Mark Hurd's silly exit has little to do with HP's real problems. As an executive there about a decade ago, I saw a company that was giving up its differentiating value in the name of operational savings, not realizing that by now the Golden Goose of creativity would find greener pastures. But surprisingly, the classic HP tradition of building a great place to do engineering that results in a flood of excellent creative products is being followed...
Read the rest of the posting.
Bruce Perens.