You may not have heard of Ann Livermore. She’s not a big flashy A-list name in Silicon Valley. But Ann Livermore has been at HP her entire career. She joined in 1982, right out of Stanford B school. She has run huge parts of HP’s business, and knows the company inside and out. She’s a true HPer in the old sense of that word: quiet, competent, loyal to the company. In 1999 she made it known that she wanted the CEO job — but she got passed over for Carly Fiorina, a flashy former sales exec from Lucent who knew nothing about HP and next to nothing about the computer industry, but who made some snazzy ads about Dave Packard’s garage. Ann Livermore did not complain. She did her job, quietly and competently.
In 2005, when Carly crashed and burned, Ann was again mentioned as a great choice for CEO — but the job went to Mark Hurd, another slick-talking sales guy, who also happened to have a penis problem. Again, Ann stayed on, and did her job. Hurd crashed and burned in 2010, and they brought in Leo Apotheker. Then, in June 2011, Ann got pushed out of her job running one of HP’s biggest divisions, though she remained on the board of directors. After all that, she still would have been a great choice to run HP. But instead the board went with Meg Whitman — a former consultant and failed politician who has been on HP’s board for all of eight months.
Friends, if you see Ann Livermore in the halls at HP today, give her a smile. Give her a hug. Do not let her near any firearms.
I’d like to challenge her to a sumo wrestling match.
You are 100% correct – Ann was an excellent and highly respected manager during my time at HP, and it is amazing – just amazing that she has been passed over. Almost criminal…
BTW, the canonical HP “Invert” parody is alive again, at http://www.phinvert.com for those who need a laugh about this.
woz, yer slipping.
Haha, yeah, true enough.
Still though, Ann Livermore is a lower profile version of Meg Whitman (corporate MBA type). What they need is a technologist. One of those guys that makes the things they sell, understands how they work, and understands what things they don’t make that customers might want to buy. It should not be is this MBA operations manager better than that MBA operations manager. It should be enough of these “business experts”, lets have a technology expert (e.g. an HP version of Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Dr. John Kelly, Bill Gates, Dr. Goodnight). They have one of these guys sitting around their Boardroom, Marc Andreessen.
How many more times is HP going to hire a bureaucrat instead of a technologist to run the joint and wonder why they are better at creating bureaucracy than technologies?
This is what Ms Livermore needs http://shaolinhouse.com/choy-lay-fut-dummy or http://shaolinhouse.com/wing-chun-dummy-exotic-hardwood /// The second one is what Bruce Lee used to practice on pounding his rival down. …
This is what Ms Livermore needs –> http://shaolinhouse.com/choy-lay-fut-dummy or http://shaolinhouse.com/wing-chun-dummy-exotic-hardwood /// The second one is what Bruce Lee used to practice on pounding his rivals down. …