HP Chairman Raymond Lane Steps Down

First time accepted submitter gkndivebum writes "The latest casualty from the ill-fated acquisition of British company Autonomy by HP appears to be Raymond Lane, who was recently re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholders. Mr. Lane will remain on the board with shareholder Ralph Whitworth as interim chairman. It will be interesting to see where the 'evolution' of the board as articulated by Mr. Whitworth leads."

Comments

58% of the votes

[rudy_wayne]

Raymond Lane, who was recently re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholders.

Winning an election with 58% of the vote is perfectly fine. Until you realize that he had no opponent. Just like elections in the old Soviet Union or other dictatorships, elections for most boards of directors are a complete fraud. If there is one seat open on the board, there is exactly one candidate.

Re:58% of the votes

[turkeydance]

Lane paves HP's path to a Kodak moment.

Re:58% of the votes

[khallow]

Winning an election with 58% of the vote is perfectly fine. Until you realize that he had no opponent. Just like elections in the old Soviet Union or other dictatorships, elections for most boards of directors are a complete fraud.

Here's a challenge. Name any sitting dictatorship that won with only 58% of the vote. It's always a win with something like 99.7% of the vote.

There are two big differences here. First, he might not have won. If 4% of those votes had shifted against him, he would be out. That's assuming my understanding of the election system is correct.

Second, the reason he won was because he represented the interests of certain large shareholders who negotiated with other large shareholders in order to secure enough votes to elect him. As long as he continued to represent those interests faithfully, no matter how incompetent or corrupt he might appear to the outside world as a result, they'll continue to sponsor him.

Directors usually do not represent the interests of all shareholders, but the interests of a few large shareholders. That's what people don't get. There's no fraud here. It's just divergent and conflicting interests.

Re:58% of the votes

[maroberts]

Unless there was a ballot option to prevent Mr Lane being reelected, he didn't need a majority; technically a single vote would get him reelected.

To win an election you don't need a majority of the votes, you just need more than anyone else.

Not the Board.

[Anonymous Coward]

At HP its actually Chairman of the Plank.

Needed to be done

[BBTaeKwonDo]

James B. Steward of the NY Times explains why.

Re:Needed to be done

[Anonymous Coward]

The NY Times story says that Vanguard voted to reelect the entire slate of directors.

I'm a satisfied customer of Vanguard's and love their service for individual customers, but have to admit that they're part of the problem when it comes to wildly overpaid CEO's and entrenched board members. Simply put, the performance of individual corporations doesn't matter to mutual fund companies with indexed or broad based investing strategies like Vanguard - if they do better, then so do all their mutual fund competitors. So do the day traders. If they do worse, then so do their competitors. So Vanguard just sticks to its knitting and strives to keep its overhead as low as possible, rather than challenging the system that could bring in Leo Apotheker and give him an 8-digit compensation package with a severance package worth over $10 million, for less than a year's work.

We need more activist investors, preferably of the responsible kind rather than the greenmailing Carl Icahn model.

Anyone else remember?

[inode_buddha]

Does anyone else remember when HP was run by engineers? I do. Back then, people wanted to buy their products and wanted to buy their stock. This is a direct hint to HP.

  Wish I had kept some of my old test gear, HP-201 audio generator, a spectrum analyzer, etc etc... still have the Tektronix scope tho. 50 years later and it still works fine. (used to do a lot of audio work)

Re:Anyone else remember?

[manu0601]

Does anyone else remember when HP was run by engineers?

I am not sure there is a company where transition from engineer lead to financial lead produced any benefit to the products. And bad products push companies in death spiral.

Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.

Re:Anyone else remember?

[Anonymous Coward]

The instrumentation division was the soul of the company and the wellspring of their technical excellence. They sold the soul of the company for money. Money which they squandered on Compaq and 3Com. There is a special circle of hell waiting for the management that went through with that sale and for those who didn't put a stop to it.

Re:Anyone else remember?

[ocratato]

Many, many years ago I worked as purchasing officer for a large research organisation. HP used to publish a magazine that showcased their latest equipment, usually describing the engineering that went into it in great detail. Within days of the magazine hitting the desks of our engineers we would get requests for these new gadgets, which HP was able to provide from local stock -- in Australia. That always impressed our engineers.

Re:Anyone else remember?

[Wildclaw]

Does that apply to countries too?

Of course. That is basically what Keynes pointed out.

Countries grow when their politicians care about reducing unemployment and putting workers to productive use. Countries stagnate when the politicians only care about the stock market looking good.

Re:Anyone else remember?

[Required Snark]

Keynes was not the first by any means. Marx also observed how society is influenced by the rich and powerful so that they benefit at the expense of the "masses".

Marx was a pretty good observer, but he was horribly wrong when it came to effecting change. After the demise of Marxism, ideologues on the right effectively rewrote history so no one would question the intrinsic failings of predatory capitalism. They falsely claimed that since the left was defeated capitalism had no flaws.

In the US, the regulation of business that started with Teddy Roosevelt, and was extended after the Great Depression, was dismantled starting with Ronald Regan. From the end of WW2 until the mid 1980's the US economic system benefited all levels of society.

Since then we've evolved into a system that transfers wealth from the vast bulk of the population to the ultra wealthy. It's not the 99% vs the 1%, it's the 99.998% vs the 0.002%. Our economic and political life revolves around the fractional billionaires. If your net worth is $100 million or more (i.e. $0.1 Billion plus) then you have an effective guarantee of unlimited future wealth for you and your decedents.

This is exactly the scenario that Marx observed at the end of the 19th century. H.G. Wells saw it as the Eloi vs. the Morlocks. In Fritz Lang's Metropolis there are the owners vs the dehumanized workers.

If the current trend continues then the US will become like the rest of the Western hemisphere. (Sorry Canada, you fate is not in your own hands.) We will oscillate between repressive inefficient right wing governments and repressive inefficient left wing governments. A choice between Argentina's Pinochet and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Imagin Orwell's 1984 as a popular weekly TV show, or A Clockwork Orange, to continue the literary references.

Re:Anyone else remember?

[roman_mir]

Do you now French Republic motto

- I know it, I visit France once in a while. This motto can be understood properly if translated from the Orwellian doublespeak into human language this way:

Liberté - entitlement to products and services that others are forced to provide to the mob. This really means entitlement for some and legalised theft with the violence of the State to provide this subsidy.

Egalité - discrimination against some to achieve supposed 'equality' for others. You can't achieve equality of outcomes if you don't discriminate against specific individuals in specific ways. You can't have equality of outcomes because you start with unequal premises, even the basics, like human physiology is unequal, never mind other properties.

Fraternité - class warfare, which is the justification for State legalised violence to achieve the discrimination to provide the entitlement.

Ummm, is private property enforcement by the government really free market?

- equality under law to have equal rights protected equally for all individuals.

This is the opposite of the class warfare in that French cry to arms.

As to 'restricting my freedom' because of 'single ecosystem', you are wrong to think that you will achieve that goal also. What you are advocating will produce the exact opposite effect, it will hurt the ecosystem more than individual freedom, in fact individual freedom results in wealth creation and it takes wealthy individuals and thus a wealthy society to be able to take care of the ecosystem.

From what I gather, the only 'solutions' that Marxists (collectivists) of all colours are proposing is control over humans, even control over entire populations.

Is life on this planet so important, that we must force people to live through it in chains of the collective?

I argue that liberty and freedom is more important than anything and that it provides the long term solutions to the problems that arise due to increase in population and various technological problems.

Anyway, I am not sure that this was of any use to you.

Cheers.

Re:Anyone else remember?

[roman_mir]

Are you talking about this:

Let me take another example: do you see class warefare there?

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal Declaration on Human Rights, article 1)

What do I see in this?

There are 2 versions of what I see based on the definition of what a 'right' is and what 'equal' means.

AFAIC a right is protection against government abuse of an individual, nothing else. So a right to private property is protection of individual's private property against claims by the collective.

'Equal' means equal before law without the law treating some people differently than others, so equal treatment by government without discrimination.

So if you take my definition of what a right is and what 'equal' means, then that sentence means the following:

All human beings are born as free individuals and cannot be coerced by government or the collective and they have equal rights before law, where the law is defined clearly and is applied equally to all people regardless of their personal circumstances.

The part about 'brotherhood' only means to me: do onto others as you would want others to do to you.

--

If you take the common (majority opinion) misconceptions and apply them to the definitions of 'right', 'equal' and 'brotherhood', then you are going to get a different meaning altogether.

A right then means an entitlement to be provided for by the collective certain goods and services, which forces an obligation on the collective to provide them somehow (so this gives the collective power over the individual to force an individual to give up his labour one way or another, thus the idea of income taxes, which I see as a tax on slaves, not on free individuals. The collective says that it owns the individual and all he can produce and the collective just chooses not to take 100% of what the individual produces and that is only because it's impossible to take 100% and not prevent individual from producing in the first place. This means that an individual doesn't have rights.)

'Equal' in this case means equal outcomes, which necessarily requires discrimination against individuals based on their personal circumstances, so this is where such notions as 'social justice' come from, which are completely Orwellian in nature, obviously there is no justice if it's not applied equally and to achieve equal outcomes the collective must treat people differently based on their different circumstances, thus this is discrimination against some for the benefit of others. Again, this is an approach to slaves, not to free individuals.

'Brotherhood' in this case really means class warfare, 'us vs them', you are either 'with us' or you are 'against us'. It's a common way to use that word around the world, it's a tribal notion, not a notion of abstract idea that you should treat people as you would want them to treat you.

In that case the sentence becomes:

All human beings are born with certain entitlements and the collective has the obligation to provide those by using the threat of collective violence against humans. The discrimination will be applied selectively based on different individual circumstances and the majority belong to a 'brotherhood' of sorts, which ensures that the collective follows this goal of discrimination, theft, slavery and violence to create the subsidy.

--

Is this what you are asking me?

--

As to what a 'nation' is, it's a set of people found in close territorial proximity from each other, probably sharing some common traits, such as language and sharing some form of common government.

HP is a mess

[arbulus]

They used to be such a respected company with bulletproof hardware. Anyone still have any of the old Laserjets around? Because, damn, those were fine printers. Their computers and servers were great. Their managed switches rivaled Cisco. Now, they're just a bunch of squabbling babies, wrapped up in office politics and too busy to focus on actually running a technology company.

Re:HP is a mess

[OhANameWhatName]

too busy to focus on actually running a technology company

That's okay, HP isn't a technology company anymore. HP is a cut price consumer electronics manufacturer. With the related level of interest in HP's products, a squabbling bunch of babies does just as well as the most brilliant leadership money can buy.

Re:Dont you mean he Jumps... lead parachute

[chromaexcursion]

Board members are not employees.
they leave. get nothing.
Frankly, for those people, they don't get paid much for being a board member either. For someone who makes over $100,000,000 a year. A job that pays $100,000 a day, but only pays for 4 days a year is a pittance. It's about power, and control.

Stepping down means admitting he's a loser!

HP's Elop

[symbolset]

The person operating HP's business from day to day isn't named "Meg". HP's Chief Operating Officer is Microsoft's former Windows Business guy named Bill Veghte. Bill Veghte has operational control of HP and Meg Whitman is his PR meatpuppet: a figurehead with zero actual operational responsibility, just like she likes it.

You haven't heard about this because we're all familiar with how Microsoft is sending out its former executives like Elop and Veghte to wrest operational control of their partners' operations to try and main control of their Wintel PC ecosystem and regain some fraction of the control they had back when they were the 800lb gorilla on the field. Veghte is running HP on the down low. Any day now they'll get control of Dell too through an LBO. A fat lot of good that will do them: we're tired of this Machiavellian bullshit and the prevention of progress it sustains. HP and Dell together don't make even HTC, let alone a Samsung. Microsoft and all their still-loyal partners together don't make an Apple, let alone an Apple + IBM + Google + Samsung. Microsoft is not only not even no longer the king of the technology hill: they're playing king of the one-of-many foothills.