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Dear Meg Whitman,
I hear you could be a candidate to be the next chief executive ofthat big, whacky company known as Hewlett-Packard. I have someunsolicited advice about this:Run!
I know it must be mighty tempting. After all, it's HP. It'sthe biggest computing company, at least in terms of revenue. (An Appleinvestor will gleefully point out who rules the market cap contest.)HP was one of the building blocks of Silicon Valley. "The HP Way" usedto be a bible for how to run a big business. And the person whosteadies the ship after a few years of nuttiness could go down as theWest Coast version of IBM's Lou Gerstner.
Now I say this in all seriousness as someone who has admired yourcareer at eBay and even your sometimes-chaotic foray intogubernatorial politics: you would be walking into a company that makes theCalifornia state government look sane.
Let's do a quick refreshercourse in HP dysfunction: A CEO was forced out because she couldn'tget operations in order. A chairwoman was forced out because she hadprivate investigators spying on employees and journalists (and wedon't care for that). Then the next CEO got forced out because, wait,we still don't quite know what happened there, do we, other than itwas seriously embarrassing? And then the latest guy, fresh from software company SAP, could be forced out because, well, we'll have to answer that one if and when ithappens.
I saw a tweet from The Wall Street Journal this week askingreaders if HP's board of directors is the worst ever. Forbes iscalling the board "pathetic." And really, who can blame Forbes forcalling it like it is.
The board took a pounding last month, ofcourse, when HP announced it wanted to sell off its PC business andspend $10.3 billion to buy Autonomy, a software company few in theUnited States had heard of. That's the PC business, by the way, thatHP doubled down on a decade ago when it bought Compaq. Atthis point, I'm completely confused about what they want to do with all thatWebOS mobile technology they picked up not all that long ago in thePalm acquisition.
The point is--and I hate to be a harpy about thewhole thing--these people really seem to be winging it.
Do you really want to be on this rollercoaster? You've got a stronglegacy at eBay. Sure, that big Skype acquisition never made a wholelot of sense, and maybe you got out before eBay ran into someproblems. But don't forget, you came in to run a little startup,guided it through some early technical problems, and helped turn itinto a household name. That's a heck of a legacy.
Look, this hero in a white hat, riding in to rescue the big,screwed-up company thing is highly overrated. Just look at whathappened to Carol Bartz at Yahoo. She went in there with a greatreputation after a long run at the software company Autodesk. Thenshe got to Yahoo, couldn't straighten out the mess, got fired, leteveryone know about it from heriPad, and is unfortunately betterknown now for her salty language than her strong career before Yahoo.That's not right.
Do you want to take that risk? Sure, your reputation already took abeating during the election, and your skin is probably thick enough tocatch a Nolan Ryan fastball without a mitt. I know you can take it.But why take it?
You lost the gubernatorial race in California. Now fixing thatgiant state is Jerry Brown'sproblem. Maybe just a tiny part of you, while you're enjoying apleasant evening not surrounded by angry prison union officials, isglad it's Brown's problem and not yours. Maybe not. But you have toadmit he's got a crazy, hard job.
Why not let someone else deal with this crazy, hard job, too?
Sincerely,
Jim Kerstetter
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I hear you could be a candidate to be the next chief executive ofthat big, whacky company known as Hewlett-Packard. I have someunsolicited advice about this:Run!
I know it must be mighty tempting. After all, it's HP. It'sthe biggest computing company, at least in terms of revenue. (An Appleinvestor will gleefully point out who rules the market cap contest.)HP was one of the building blocks of Silicon Valley. "The HP Way" usedto be a bible for how to run a big business. And the person whosteadies the ship after a few years of nuttiness could go down as theWest Coast version of IBM's Lou Gerstner.
Now I say this in all seriousness as someone who has admired yourcareer at eBay and even your sometimes-chaotic foray intogubernatorial politics: you would be walking into a company that makes theCalifornia state government look sane.
Let's do a quick refreshercourse in HP dysfunction: A CEO was forced out because she couldn'tget operations in order. A chairwoman was forced out because she hadprivate investigators spying on employees and journalists (and wedon't care for that). Then the next CEO got forced out because, wait,we still don't quite know what happened there, do we, other than itwas seriously embarrassing? And then the latest guy, fresh from software company SAP, could be forced out because, well, we'll have to answer that one if and when ithappens.
I saw a tweet from The Wall Street Journal this week askingreaders if HP's board of directors is the worst ever. Forbes iscalling the board "pathetic." And really, who can blame Forbes forcalling it like it is.
The board took a pounding last month, ofcourse, when HP announced it wanted to sell off its PC business andspend $10.3 billion to buy Autonomy, a software company few in theUnited States had heard of. That's the PC business, by the way, thatHP doubled down on a decade ago when it bought Compaq. Atthis point, I'm completely confused about what they want to do with all thatWebOS mobile technology they picked up not all that long ago in thePalm acquisition.
The point is--and I hate to be a harpy about thewhole thing--these people really seem to be winging it.
Do you really want to be on this rollercoaster? You've got a stronglegacy at eBay. Sure, that big Skype acquisition never made a wholelot of sense, and maybe you got out before eBay ran into someproblems. But don't forget, you came in to run a little startup,guided it through some early technical problems, and helped turn itinto a household name. That's a heck of a legacy.
Look, this hero in a white hat, riding in to rescue the big,screwed-up company thing is highly overrated. Just look at whathappened to Carol Bartz at Yahoo. She went in there with a greatreputation after a long run at the software company Autodesk. Thenshe got to Yahoo, couldn't straighten out the mess, got fired, leteveryone know about it from heriPad, and is unfortunately betterknown now for her salty language than her strong career before Yahoo.That's not right.
Do you want to take that risk? Sure, your reputation already took abeating during the election, and your skin is probably thick enough tocatch a Nolan Ryan fastball without a mitt. I know you can take it.But why take it?
You lost the gubernatorial race in California. Now fixing thatgiant state is Jerry Brown'sproblem. Maybe just a tiny part of you, while you're enjoying apleasant evening not surrounded by angry prison union officials, isglad it's Brown's problem and not yours. Maybe not. But you have toadmit he's got a crazy, hard job.
Why not let someone else deal with this crazy, hard job, too?
Sincerely,
Jim Kerstetter
Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin | Settlement Statement | WordPress Tutorials