HP board cooked Hurd's goose before settlement The drip, drip of spin from HP continues with sources telling the media that HP's board of directors had decided to ditch chief exec Mark Hurd before he reached a private agreement with Jodie Fisher over sexual harassment allegations. These latest claims are in opposition to claims earlier this week that the board felt snubbed …
It is not just that "thousands of workers who need to be made redundant". The important bit is that it will be done according to someone's else's strategy and there will be no need to have any great ideas or worries about the future of the company.
All that is necessary is to be Mr Excellence in Execution which is what Hurd is.
This is also the reason why Hurd is least likely to resurface in VC space. There at his salary level you need to be "Excellence in Vision" or at least being able to recognise one when you meet one. Executionists come later in the game, when the vision has already taken off and someone has to patch up things so it can fly.
So, in the past few weeks we have learned:
1.) There was a sexual harassment complaint against Hurd, one which the woman later denied because she said no relationship or action took place. She further said she didn't want him to lose his job, she just wanted some money.
2.) HP's board did an investigation of the claim, and found him not guilty. In the process, they examined his records and found errors in expenses between $1,000 and $20,000 total, over the course of his entire tenure. For a man of Hurd's position, that could mean one of his secretaries wrote the wrong name on one single promotional dinner or outing by accident. You would be hard pressed to find a single CEO of a major company who had less accounting error in their records.
From all of this we learned that HP has no reason to fire Hurd. This is evidenced in the fact that they didn't fire him, they asked him to resign and paid his compensation package. Obviously someone on the HP board was jealous or upset with Hurd and wanted him out of the way so they could take the lead. But who?
Now since then, we learn that HP got mad that he was dealing with the issue privately and professionally, so they childishly screamed the story to the whole world in order to try to damage his reputation. The someone-is-out-to-get-him angle is further strengthened by the fact that HP now claims they made the decision to try to get rid of him before the harassment non-scandal even came up.
So, what is it that pissed off the board? Is it because Hurd more than doubled the value of the company in 5 years? Is it because Hurd slapped Cisco across the face, bought 3COM and started trying to become number one in networking? HP already won the number one slot in desktops, notebooks, workstations, printers, servers... they needed room to grow. Or is the board mad about the Palm acquisition and HP's movement into alternative OSes and possibly the phone market? They deny they are interested in the phone market... but if you're going to make tablet PCs you might as well do phones. They're the same thing.
Interesting analysis here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704296704575431322299349154.html
To summarize, what some people think pissed the board off was that he had already screwed the pooch during the spy scandal and they had thrown Dunn under the bus to let him off the hook.
Personally, I think the guy was just a hack anyway and our BoD isn't any better. Throw all the fuckers off into the street and the company would keep going just fine, albeit with much improved margins.
...these sleazebags just tell the truth and the whole truth in one fell swoop - I count the HP Board and Hurd as sleazebags here.
I have a feeling that there is something going on that we have not been told about and the Board and Hurd would prefer to keep quiet.
Working at HP just got worse if you are in a customer facing role - something I once doubted was possible.
Why did I click the link to read this?
It's not about technology, it's about "celebrity" (albeit IT) gossip and tittle-tattle. I don't give a s*** about Mark Hurd - but it's probably because I was once a HP-UX admin and was then interested in the fate of PA-RISC.
Grubby.
Unless there are accompanying pictures, can't you just get back to the bits and bytes?
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