Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/10/hp_board_overreact/

Did Hewlett-Packard overreact on Hurd's Fishergate?

Dell, Intel and high-tech's ski lodges

By Timothy Prickett Morgan

Posted in On-Prem, 10th August 2010 10:02 GMT

Comment After its tumultuous time under president and chief executive Carly Fiorina followed by the journalist spying scandal that cost chairman Patricia Dunn her job, you can't blame Hewlett-Packard's board for being a little jumpy about a sex scandal and padded expenses.

Or maybe you can, especially if cutting the cord on CEO, president and chairman Mark Hurd totally screws up HP's business, or becomes the catch-all excuse for a whole lot of things going wrong that were going to go wrong no matter who was in charge of the company.

When Hurd came into HP in 2005, what he did was figure out where the company could fire lots of employees without totally screwing up - something HP needed in the wake of digesting PC and server maker Compaq in 2002.

If Hurd did not, according to HP's investigation, sexually harass HP contractor Jodie Fisher what he really did was pad his expenses. This is a bad thing, to be sure, and one that does not endear trust on the part of the board of directors, shareholders, and employees.

But look at what Intel has gotten away with for a decade of anticompetitive behavior with the Federal Trade Commission or Dell (the man) and Dell (the company) got away with when they did not disclose the nature of the funny money from Intel that propped up Dell's business. Neither had to admit any wrongdoing, and there was plenty of evidence that there was wrongdoing.

Instead of nuking Hurd and upsetting HP's business, perhaps the smarter thing to do would have been to bust Hurd back down to the CEO rank and bring in another HPer from down below to be the designated president of the company and the clear next in line.

The board could have appointed a new chairman - perhaps pulling someone from its existing board of directors - and taken away some of Hurd's power as well. This would have been less disruptive and would not have cost as much as the $40m to $50m in payouts that Hurd will be due with his golden handshake.

And before we get all high and mighty about the HP founding fathers, William Hewlett and David Packard, let me just say this. Packard grew up in Colorado and was an avid skier all his life. And in the early 1960s when HP was expanding outside of Silicon Gulch, the very first place HP looked to build its new factory was back in Colorado.

The company settled in Loveland, home of HP's wonderful calculators, and its disk drive business, sold off in 1996, was located in Boise, Idaho. Good skiing in both places. And the Packards were just like the Watson family at IBM, who put a chip plant in Burlington, Vermont, in the early 1960s to be near a ski lodge they started.

Is that fudging the expenses? You're damned right it is.

Who knows what really went on between Hurd and the HP board? For all we know, there are larger forces at work. There's plenty of chatter that HP needed someone with more pizzazz in the CEO position, that the cost cutting was making HP employees very unhappy as was the exorbitant compensation for the top brass while employees took paycuts during the economic downturn.

There may be other issues about the direction of HP - particularly with the EDS, Palm, and 3Com acquisitions - that weighed in on the decision to let Hurd go.

Large IT companies have two problems. First, they pay their top people too much - indeed, they feel they have to so their competitors don't nick their top execs. The other problem is they are too eager to give one person all three top jobs, abdicating responsibility for the board by and large.

A board of directors (herded by the chairman) is supposed to be separate from the strategic planning for the company (CEO), which is supposed to be separate from the day-to-day operations of the company (president). Giving all three jobs to the same person simplifies the decision making process, but it runs the risk of turning executives into tyrants, too. And sometimes, the taste of such power can be, well, overpowering.

IBM opportunity?

Even if you wanted to argue that Hurd should have kept his job, revving the cost-cutting chainsaw and companion woodchipper near the cubicles and factory lines where HP employees work, I don't think you can argue that Hurd should have had the president, CEO, and chairman titles inclusive. It's not that HP's bench is too shallow or too old, as you might argue is the case at IBM. It is just that it is a bad idea to put that much power in one person except at critical times.

With the health of Steve Jobs open to question, Apple has similarly unclear succession issues, with Jobs being CEO and chairman. Oracle is smarter about this, with a chairman (Jeff Henley), a CEO (company co-founder Larry Ellison) and two co-presidents (Charles Phillips and Safra Catz), spreading out the jobs and making succession a little more clear. IBM has Sam Palmisano in the three top roles and getting closer to retirement, and it is not obvious who might take over, as El Reg has discussed in recent weeks.

So who's potentially in the frame to lead HP?

Ironically, it could turn out that Steve Mills, who has just taken over IBM's converged software and systems group, who could emerge as a front-runner from the outside to run the company.

Mills, who is 58, has run IBM's software group since it was formed in 1995 out of some disparate software businesses. He has a mainframe hardware background and, for whatever it is worth, can talk technology better than any of the other current top execs at IBM, including Palmisano.

IBM surely doesn't want to lose Mills, but at his age, unless IBM does something differently, Mills cannot run IBM because he is only a year younger than Palmisano, who is 59. IBM CEOs have tended to retire at 60, but sometimes hang around as chairman for a year or two after the new CEO is chosen.

I happen to think the IBM reorganization in July that saw four executives, including Mills, get more power was less about succession and more about Palmisano deciding to stay on as well as the other executives as a younger and deeper bench is cultivated to run IBM beyond 2015.

Which means unless HP is willing to shell out some serious bags of cash, Mills is going to stay put.

I don't think that John Joyce, IBM's former CFO who is on the HP board and who ran IBM's services business aground and eventually lost his job is in the running for the top job at HP, as has been suggested.

There's talk about Ned Hooper, chief strategy officer at Cisco Systems, possibly being on the short list, but at 41, Hooper seems a bit green for the job. Cisco chief technology officer Padmarasee Warrior, who has been mentioned as a possible contender, might turn out to be a fine CEO in the long run, but I suspect we will find that out when and if she takes over Cisco after incumbent CEO John Chambers retires.

As El Reg explained elsewhere, Ann Livermore, who runs HP's $54bn enterprise business unit (meaning everything that is not a printer or a PC), would be an obvious top contender for the CEO job. But then again, she was passed over when Fiorina was brought in from Lucent Technologies in 1999 and one more time when Hurd got the job.

David Donatelli, who works for Livermore running HP's enterprise server, storage and networking group, only joined HP last April and seems too new for the job, but he could be a president to Livermore's CEO. Ditto for Vyomesh Joshi, who runs HP's imaging and printer group profit center, and Todd Bradley, who runs personal systems, could also be presidents if HP decides to break the top jobs back up again. Bradley has only been at HP for three years, and was the CEO at Palm before that.

To save face, it would not be at all surprising to see HP anointed a new chairman, pick a top HP insider as CEO, and give the president post to another HPer.

Then, of course, there's the wildcard possibility. How about making Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and once its CEO and chairman, chairman of the HP board? That ought to liven things up a bit. And Livermore can get on with the job she is capable of, which is running HP. At least until Oracle and HP merge, giving Larry Ellison a real hardware business and the CEO post at HP. ®