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.

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?

[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.

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.

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.