Counterpoint – A New “HP Way?”

Ed Crowley is a friend, a partner and a boss, and for all those reasons it’s not always a good idea to disagree, especially in public. But respectful differences are permitted, and for the sake of a lively debate I’ll offer a counterpoint to his point from What IBM Had That HP Doesn’t, published recently.

• During HP’s analyst call on Thursday announcing the transition from Leo Apotheker to Meg Whitman, Chairman of the Board Ray Lane stressed several times that today’s board is not the board that caused a scandal (pretexting) or the board that got rid of Mark Hurd and hired Apotheker. So clearly they are positioning the new board as part of the new HP. This was an implicit admission that there have been problems in the past at board level as well. Most observers would not, however, consider CEO support as the main issue. More often you will hear comments about overall diligence and dysfunction, which are now apparently being addressed as well.

• Regardless of the level of board support, neither Hurd nor Apotheker was a Lou Gerstner, each for their own reasons. So I would suggest not to overplay the aspect of board support as the cause of Apotheker’s downfall. Ultimately, he was dropped not because of bad IR and communications policies (although those did not help), but because of weak operational execution. And that is clearly what the board and their stakeholders are looking for in Whitman.

• Several speakers on the call stressed the importance and relevance of the hardware business and were obviously concerned that the right business message goes out to the public and to their own people. While Ed’s IBM comparison is valid, yesterday’s statements reminded me of a recent Xerox briefing, when Ursula Burns and her team stressed the importance of hardware at least a half dozen times. I think the question should be: does HP want to be another IBM, another Xerox, or something else? They are in fact uniquely positioned to be a “third-way” provider. Maybe they can use this opportunity to re-invent the “HP way.”

Yes, strong support from the board is vital for a CEO. But if the CEO delivers a strong balance of vision, execution and results, a board’s lukewarm support can be tolerated. And more likely, if all those metrics are delivered strongly, the board will be the CEO’s strongest supporters.