HP board chairman Ray Lane is lashing out at critics who are pinning the blame for HP’s mess on the board of directors, who are described in this New York Times article as the “worst board in the history of business.”
Now HP’s directors are getting heat for making the incredible blunder of hiring Leo Apotheker as CEO and firing him after 11 months.
Ray says that’s not his fault, nor is it the fault of his fellow directors. “This board did not select Leo,” he says.
Lane points out that eight of the 14 current board members, including Ray Lane himself, were not involved in selecting Apotheker.
That’s true. Several of the new board members did not choose Apotheker — Apotheker chose them.
Ray Lane fails to mention that five of the new board members were selected by Apotheker (or at least with his input): Pat Russo, Dominique Senequier, Gary Reiner, Meg Whitman and Shumeet Banerji. And several of those people had long ties to Apotheker, as Bloomberg reported at the time.
But more chilling than that is the fact that Lane and Apotheker are old friends. Lane, in fact, joined HP to serve as Apotheker’s consigliere.
Lane and Apotheker have known each other for two decades. Lane joined HP at the same time that Apotheker did, in part because he wanted to work with Apotheker, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In fact their appointments were announced in the same HP press release.
In that press release, Lane said: “I am excited to join the Board of this pioneering company, and look forward to working closely with Léo – and the rest of the Board and senior management team – as they capitalize on the changes taking place across the industry. I have known and admired Léo for almost 20 years. He is ideally suited to build on HP’s strong foundation, leverage its many assets and keep the company at the forefront of innovation.”
Soon after that, Lane spoke to the San Jose Mercury News about his “close working relationship with Apotheker, whom he has known since Lane hired Apotheker as an Oracle consultant in the 1990s.”
But how things have changed. Now that Apotheker is out, Ray Lane says he wasn’t one of the guys who hired him, so the world should stop giving him shit about it.
In fact, Ray Lane now says Leo wasn’t very well qualified at all. Speaking to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD tonight, Lane said: “Leo was very wise about figuring out what HP needed to do to add value. But he did not have more important tools we needed, including operational excellence, people skills and communications skills.”
Furthermore, Lane tells AllThingsD that he’s been talking to Meg Whitman about taking over since last February — only three months after he and Apotheker joined HP, hand in hand.
Ray Lane says he approached Whitman because “she had the kind of leadership that HP needed and was lacking under ousted CEO Leo Apotheker,” Kara Swisher reports.
So, wait. In November 2010 Ray Lane joined HP for the chance to work alongside his old friend Leo Apotheker, whom he called “ideally suited” to be CEO. But by February 2011, Ray Lane was already plotting behind his back to get rid of him.
And now Ray Lane — loyal friend, and man of integrity — is angry at critics who question the judgment of the HP board of directors and suggest these folks are perhaps not the best and brightest in the business world.
This after they’ve just hired a new CEO from among their own ranks without conducting a job search because they didn’t think it was necessary and anyway time’s a-wasting and they need to fill that CEO job right away because this is, after all, the world’s largest technology company, one that does nearly $130 billion a year in revenue, and so why not just pick a CEO from whoever’s sitting in the room with you?
Of course, according to Ray Lane, Meg Whitman is an amazing talent who is ideally suited to run HP and has all the qualifications for the job and Ray Lane just totally thinks the world of her. Today.
Two thoughts:
1. Watch your back, Meg Whitman.
2. Stay classy, Ray Lane.
Oh this is very, very Gill Amelia’esque. Too bad there is no Mr. H oder Mr. P to lure back to save the mess. Too bad, indeed.
Love it.
Unbelievable what’s going on at HP. Thanks for the insights.
Fairly typical of the business environment, where management know that the primarily institutional shareholders will rarely make incompetents pay the price. Instead they leave supported by their golden parachutes. If this situation wasn’t caused by corruption then it was caused by incompetence. I will not be buying H-P stock any time soon.
Funny, that comment Christian G posted. That would most likely be the scenario if Hewlett and Packard were still amongst the living. It actually happened once in HP history that one of the founders came out of retirement to put the company back on the right path. Now all Lane can do is run to the Ouija board to get that kind of advice.
You have a little type in there Dan, where you have Ray Lane coming to HP to work alongside his old friend Ray Lane. It does sounds like the guys loves himself a bit, but I don’t think that’s what you meant. Unless I need another cup of coffee to catch the humor this morning.
Fixed it. Thanks. I’m the one who needs more coffee.
Typical: at the first sign of trouble, they throw the Jewish guy under the bus…
Ouch. Devastating critique — well done.
Spot on and hilarious!
Dear Ray Lane.
Please leave Silicon Valley and return to wherever you came from. Your time is up. We have run out of patience with your stupidity. We gave you much longer than Larry Ellison to prove you are not stupid. But you are actually quite stupid indeed. So please go away. You are stinking up Silicon Valley and causing a huge old person gassy problem in the air by the bay.
The Jews taught us everything we need to know about throwing gentiles under the bus.
The Jews taught us everything one needs to know about throwing people under the bus.
Nice comment system. The reply to comment works 0 % well Dan.
@Justin Thyme – comment system works just about as well as your bloody anti-semitism, mate.
I like this article. It caught my eye on Google News and I was about to rip whoever was defending Ray Lane, but you have got that sarcasm thing working.
1) Ray Lane pushed for the “lets get out of the things we are good at and into the things that could potentially have higher profit margins” strategy. Yes, enterprise software has higher profit margins than hardware. So what. What makes him think that Oracle, IBM and others are just going to let this mismanaged upstart walk into their market. Larry Ellison will give unstructured and search software away just to spite Ray Lane. Hey, oil also has huge profit margins. Maybe they should try taking on Exxon.
2) Ray Lane has demonstrated a lack of integrity. He pushed for the current HP strategy as much as Leo. When Wall Street and customers had four heart attacks simultaneously, he used Leo as a fall guy. Who he accounts as a “friend” of 20 years. He says that the strategy was “miscommunicated.” Well he was out speaking to investors and journalists as much as Leo and he did not seem to inspire much confidence. There is no way you can “communicate” your way around paying 28.4x forward net profit margins for Autonomy. Those Wall Street guys know how math works. There is no way that you can write off tablets and the $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm without causing a sell-off. The Board approved the ridiculous idea to telecast their PC strategy to their competitors so they would have the opportunity to start poaching customers while HP figures out a plan. Rationale from Lane: Well, we can’t keep anything confidential, so we might as well just announce it as opposed to leak it…. The communication was fine. The substance of what was being communicated was not.
3) Meg Whitman…. Not only was she not the best candidate in the world. She was not the best candidate in the Boardroom. If they wanted to hire someone amongst the dozen people at the table, why not Marc Andreessen? His knowledge of the technology industry is immense, Meg’s is zero. He has developed, from the idea up, at least two very successful technology companies: Netscape and Opsware (which HP now owns). He is widely respected amongst customers and technology insiders.
@faddah
Mr. Thyme was responding to a comment regarding throwing the Jew under the bus. Why did you not complaint about that comment being anti Gentiles?
Simple, Jews and their supporters cannot stand any criticism, if you are critical of anything at all, you all lower yourselves to the gutter and call everyone antisemitic.
It is the time for people in the world to stop cuddling the Jews or standing for their empty accusations. The people of my generation had nothing to do with WWII, so get over it!
When you bring the accusations of anti semitism to the argument, you have already lost. It might work with the scared old generation, but we just laugh about it knowing that is your last grasp for air. Here is a question, why do every ethnic group able to live alongside others without major problems, except the Jews? Getting thrown out of every country most mean something, and it is not that the rest of the world was wrong and this difficult small minority right!
It is like the kid in school that smells bad and nobody likes, but declares that is everybody else’s fault except him. Pretty crazy, isn’t?
Thank you Eduardo,
Furthermore, I have proof.
The chief rabbi says gentiles are donkeys who are here to serve the Jews.
http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782
I agree with you Justin. I have read the Torah, and if anyone would read it, they will find out what is taught in Israel and Jewish schools. Basically to denigrate everyone else. Our own press knows this but do not care or are afraid of losing their jobs, which they can, if they talk openly about this.
Getting a little off track, how can the US be considered a neutral broker in the Palestinians/Israelis talks, when all our negotiators are Jewish American? Pretty blatant, but does our press says anything, nope, I know that they are gagged.
And if anybody questions any of my points regarding the press, I can show you proof of ownership of all our major media outlets and newspapers.
A liitle bit into how this came to happen. Someone has a media business, gets up for sale. Anybody buys it, and a few years later sells again to someone else, etc. But, when it ends in the hands of a Jew, it will never transferred ownership, except to another Jew. Just look at Disney, CNN, etc.
It is sad how most Americans have been brainwashed and do not complaint to this type of tyranny!
Thank you Justin and Eduardo. Love your analysis and knowledge of the matter. Can’t wait for more of your enlightening comments on the subject. If only HP board had the advantage of your wisdom and foresight.
Where is Jack Welch when you need him?
@George
Maybe President Obama can run HP.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/09/obama-congressional-black-caucus-video-gaffe.html
We are now in the era of the “bungee executive”.. tie on; leap into new company… on the way down- check if they are centralized or decentralized; do the opposite. Lay off as many employees as required to make the numbers you promissed and declare yourself brilliant. Collect massive bonuses. As the elastic tightens… grab hold of severance package suitcase… take rap for the inevitable disaster from all the cost-cutting on the way back up with even MORE millions… repeat
There’s this old book I dusted off the other day called “In Search of Excellence” with a lot of great examples of stellar management practices from a company called Hewlett-Packard. Maybe someone’s admin over there at HP could get on Amazon and get their hands some used copies to pass around to the BoD. Make sure there used copies. I think pretty much anybody’s highlighting and underlining would help.