Interesting. The NY Times’ Joe Nocera chimes in on the demise of Mark Hurd at Hewlett-Packard.
But the blogosphere had already revealed a week ago the essence of the information in Nocera’s article. Another reflection of how the mainstream media is now often decidedly behind the blogosphere in providing key information about breaking events.
And not to pile on, but how does one of the best business reporters of the NY Times write an article about this situation and not ask the most important unanswered question? That is, why did the H-P Board accept Hurd’s resignation and provide him a $40 million severance package if the Board had grounds to terminate him for cause?
And if the Board didn’t have cause to fire Hurd, then why did Hurd’s contract not make violation of H-P’s written code of business conduct cause for termination of employment? Is that the same for other H-P contracts with its executives? At least this subsequent WSJ article gets closer to answering those questions.
My bet is that the blogosphere will ultimately provide the answer to that question more quickly than the NY Times.
You don’t need to wait for the blogosphere, just read the official statements. HP’s sexual harassment policy is weak enough that Hurd’s actions, whatever they were, were not grounds for dismissal. Nor were the “non-material” misstatements on his expense accounts. But the expense account fudging has material implications. “If the CEO can fudge his expenses and get away with it, then so can I” would have been popular logic and led to all kinds of trouble if the Board hadn’t convinced him to quit.
But now is the right time for Hurd to go, anyway. Even after five years, he still can’t get the Enterprise Services division to sell printers and PCs, which don’t add to their division’s own profits. And there’s the vision thing. With enormous industry realignments on the horizon due to “cloud computing” and the emergence of huge markets in smartphones and tablet, how is HP going to lead rather than muddle through?
Finally, Nocera is right about employee dissatisfaction. When the global economy was collapsing and anyone who still had a job considered themselves lucky, you could avoid open rebellion when imposing an across-the-board pay cut of 10%, except for those employees who got cut more and the few execs who got millions more. But with the economy recovering, however slowly, the 2/3 of the employees who would leave in a heartbeat are going to see resurrection elsewhere, and Hurd had no clues how to keep them with HP.