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Sources Say Meg Whitman To Become HP CEO
MrCrassic writes "Looks like HP needed yet another remodeling, as they are tapping Meg Whitman to take Leo Apotheker's chair by this afternoon. From the All Things D article: 'Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is poised to be named CEO of Hewlett-Packard later today after the markets are closed, said multiple sources close to the situation. The full board of HP, which is meeting today in Silicon Valley, has not officially voted on move and the situation could certainly change, but sources said it is nearly a done deal.' Cringely got this one right."
Another "brand is everything, fuck product" CEO? Another CEO that never ventured anywhere near an engineering department or shop floor?
Another CEO that thinks selling technology is like selling colored sugar water? Another Scully, but for HP?
Short HP. Short it to 0.
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BMO
I thought this article was posted on the Onion at first.
You know, this is why I need to land me that first CEO job. It seems that no matter how badly you fuck up, no matter how many pooches you screw, no matter how toxic you are to shareholder assets or confidence, and no matter how much of a buffoon you make of yourself, as long as you've been a CEO, you will always get hired.
So that you actually get someone who understands the company and the products, in that doesn't...
Dvorak on Doomtech
Wait, the moron who bought Skype - and didn't bother to check to see if she was getting the patents - is going to somehow turn HP around?
Yeah. Right.
Meg Witless could barely run a taco stand, let alone HP. She made Carly Failorina look competent. eBay was a great idea - which she had nothing to do with - and Meg rode that idea along with the dot com boom to "success". Once the boom ended, so did eBay's growth. It's been pretty much stagnant since.
The only smart move eBay has made in the past decade or so was buying PayPal, and that was a no-brainer everybody and his brother suggested eBay do. Their attempt to become another Amazon has only succeeded in devaluing their core auction business.
Building a website based company is completely different from running a hardware company. Witness Carly Fiorina's tenure for an example of how that goes, and even she was kind of selling hardware at Lucent. Ebay had no supply chain to deal with, HP is nothing BUT supply chain. Also, let's not forget that the explosive growth of eBay was one of these right place right idea right time once in a lifetime things.
If I was an HP shareholder, right about now my first thoughts wouldn't be "should we fire the CEO"... it would be more along the lines of "this fucking board has got to go..."
For chrissakes, we're talking about one of THE great Silicon Valley companies here, a company whose printer line alone still commands the industry. It's like the entire leadership has gone completely insane.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The vast majority of HP's revenue comes from enterprise markets, which Meg Whitman has zero experience with.
OK, I just have to jump in here. CEO's, on the scale of businesses like HP, don't deal with end-users, enterprise or otherwise. They don't need "shop floor" experience, though that never hurts. They certainly don't need experience in this or that product line. What they do need, in spades, is the ability to pick the right people to work immediately under them. Product strategy isn't set in a vacuum by CEO fiat. HP's recent missteps positively reek of a cadre of VP's who are little more than "yes men", toadies who are unwilling to point out the emperor's nudity, or worse, who lack the chops to run their divisions. That HP missed so badly on their table execution demonstrates a failing far deeper than the myopic CEO who green-lighted a major product without realizing the gaping hole in it (no apps).
Maybe Meg can turn that around. First sign that she can will be a major shakeup at the VP level.
CEOs are kind of like movie directors. You're going to spend $100,000,000 on a movie, so do you hire the guy who's made a string of flops but also made one movie which made $1,000,000,000 profit, or do you hire the new guy who's never made a movie? If you hire director A and he screws up, you pass the buck onto them, whereas if you hire director B and he screws up, you take the blame.
We live in a society where leaders have been replaced with MBAs and empty-headed politicos who look good on camera, and rule number one is 'Pass The Buck!'. Once you realise that, most of the seemingly insane behaviour of modern 'leaders' makes perfect sense.
DING DING DING.
The board of directors is a bunch of CEO cronies (ask yourself why Meg Whitman is even on the board in the first place, does she own 5%+ of the stock? Does she have a vested interest in the company succeeding or just padding her resume for another failed political bid?). Oh there are one or two actual shareholders on the board but not with the voting power to actually right this ship. The board of directors of most of the fortune 500 are populated by other CEO's. That's the demise of American capitalism. You wonder why CEO salaries have increased at about 100% a year and why golden parachutes exist? This is why.
Personally I blame mutual funds that own 75% of these companies and take no vested interest in the company or it's management.
It's meaningless to say "80% of millionares are first-generation" because $1M in 1980 is equivalent to $2.6M now. If you start retirement with $1M in the bank right now and a 3.5% withdrawl rate (which is reasonable), you'll only be taking out $35K/year to live on!
Runaway wealth accrual is not caused by people who have accumulated $1M during a career; we're talking about people who get ten times that much every year even when the business fails. The lowest of the top 5 hedge fund managers in 2010 made $1.4 billion, which is obviously 1,400 times as much, in a single year, as the entrepreneurs and professional to which you refer accumulated over the course of a career. Doing the math, that's the same as equating somebody who makes $100,000 per year with somebody else who has a net worth of $71. Are the people I'm talking about really thousands of times more productive than the people you're talking about?