Slashdot Mirror
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."
No stranger himself to sexual harassment allegations, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
I heard Larry Ellison keeps the sexual harassment forms in the bottom drawer of his desk. That way when a woman goes to get one he can check out her ass.
.
Trolling is a art,
With so many senior tech company staff quitting or being fired in the past few weeks, I must conclude that there is a connection. The Earth is doomed, and these individuals have been chosen to be part of the secret task-force designing the space craft that will whisk the rich and influential away to live on another planet.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Be nice to find another news source - like this one where a login was not needed.
"In losing Mark Hurd, the H-P board failed to act in the best interest of H.P.'s employees, shareholders, customers and partners," Ellison wrote in an email to The New York Times, which posted excerpts of the email late Monday. "The H-P board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false."
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
My understanding, though I've not read about the case in depth, is that he was accused, he admitted to it, and the accuser had already worked out a resolution, then the crap hit the fan, so to speak.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
According to one of my old classmates who works at HP, they've either been keeping everything really quiet, or there is no evidence. He is betting on the latter. This may just be a case of slander/libel. It does not take much for a woman to accuse a man of a crime that he did not commit and get him into heaps of trouble for it.
Happened to me in the 90s and on a much smaller scale. I was accused of groping a woman, and when the cop arrived, she couldn't even keep her story straight. The cop tried to convince her how to best make up her story in front of my face. I was arrested. When we went to court, I provided microcassette audio and a transcript of what had happened. Cop was fired, and they tried the woman for perjury. Still made my life a nightmare.
Is this how "corruption on a massive scale" is spelled, nowadays?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Part of the scandal that she didn't want him fired as he had already settled the harassment charges with her. The pictures I saw showed very attractive actress back in her 30s (she is 50 now). She was hired for marketing and networking. ("HP paid her up to $5,000 per event to greet people and make introductions among executives")
She reported unwanted advances and that uncovered a forged dinner reimbursement with her that was why he was ousted. (He probably was with another woman but claimed it was her so he could get dinner reimbursed.) She says she was "surprised and saddened" that Hurd lost his job. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38611219/ns/business-us_business/
He was not fired for the sexual harassment stuff. In fact he was cleared of violating HP's policy and he settled the suit out of court. Both he and woman have confirmed that they did not have a sexual relationship.
He was fired for filing inaccurate expense reports totalling about $20,000. Basically he concealed the fact that he was expensing meetings with this woman. HP has stated that they do have clear evidence of that, and that Hurd admitted it and offered to repay the $20k. Instead they fired him.
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.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
Really, is anyone surprised that this is Larry Ellison's reaction? (Regardless of the actual details of the allegations or truth of them.)
He's the kind of guy (the bit about him in the Washington Post article linked in TFA speaks to this somewhat, if you're not familiar) who thinks of executives as a kind of new aristocracy, able to do whatever they want and sleep with whichever female employees they want without limit or accountability.
People rag on the quirks tech CEOs like Ballmer and Jobs (and some of it's deserved and/or funny), but Ellison is a honest-to-god king of the douchebags.
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.
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
Severance Pay: $40M Not having to live through the consequences of accidently buying a behind the curve smartphone manufacturer, and having your CEO buddies think you were booted for sexy stuff: Priceless.
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.