∞ HP's board is like 'a shit fight in the monkey cage at the zoo'

Written by

Writing for GigaOM, David Churbuck outlines what he would tell the new CEO of HP to do:

Get a better board. It sounds like a shit fight in the monkey cage at the zoo inside of HPs board. The CEO needs to stack the deck with allies and advisors, not glory seekers who pull down each other’s pants.

That sums up HP for the last couple of years.


Tags:

  • http://www.theuniversalsteve.com Anonymous

    But the CEO is hired by the board, not the other way around. The board is elected by the stockholders. And the only stockholders with enough holdings to have any real weight in electing board members are institutional investors. 75% of HP’s stock is held by institutional investors (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=HPQ+Major+Holders). I just don’t think they are going to rise up and sack the board. The people who run the mutual funds are probably all pals with the people who serve on the corporate boards.

  • Anonymous

    HP has the board they deserve. The problem is that they are not one company. What we call HP is EDS, Compaq, Palm, and a couple of others, and does not even include the original HP, which was spun off in 1999.

    Sometimes people talk about AT&T as if it is the same company from the past, not a new company formed in 2007 with an old name. Same with HP. That is not HP you are looking at there, it is Compaq et al.

    HP’s big problem is that the 66% of their business that is profitable is sort of under the radar, and the 33% of their business that is barely profitable, a total disaster, is very public, that is what most people know. And also, they make printers, which are obsolete since iPad shipped at least, and probably before.

    So they really need to spin off their consumer PC’s and get back to the kind of profitability that real companies make, as fast as they can.