After the Hurd
The following is a guest post by Kerry Sulkowicz, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is the managing principal of Boswell Group LLC. He advises CEOs, investors and politicians on the dynamics of leadership, corporate culture and governance. The opinions expressed are his own.
About the only thing that’s clear in the story of Mark Hurd’s downfall last week as CEO of HP is how much we don’t know. Statements issued by HP, by Hurd, and by Hurd’s accuser reveal remarkably little about what was unquestionably a bad week for everyone involved.
Yet there are some meaningful clues if we read between the lines.
Mark Hurd
HP’s hot, steamy mess
The following is a guest post by Patrick Dailey, a senior human resources executive, who worked for Hewlett-Packard as vice president of global talent management during the time period when Compaq was being integrated into Hewlett-Packard. The opinions expressed are his own.
A hot, steaming mess was kicked to the curb late on Friday.
Messes like this are intentionally dumped on Friday afternoons following the closing bell to avoid notice. They are supposed to cool down over the weekend and hopefully be taken over by something new come market open on Monday.
But there was no way that this mess would go unnoticed, even after a late Friday afternoon announcement.
The executive responsible for creating it acted stupidly and was justifiably removed from his post.
But, the real story here is the back story.
Arguably the most sensationalized female plaintiff’s attorney, Gloria Allred, has been hired by Jodie Fisher, a 50-year-old single mother who made a sexual harassment complaint against Mark Hurd, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and has her own sensational profile, appearing in provocative reality TV shows and movies. After HP curtailed Fisher’s lucrative marketing services agreement with them, Allred was hired and expected to advance the sexual harassment complaint.
“Malfeasance can cause a CEO to loose his job”
At least he didn’t lose it!
“incremental to the $15 million to $40 million”
Incremental? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
“epic-center” – what on earth is an epic-center? Is that some kind of super cool epicenter?
Spellcheck is no substitute for reading it before you publish it.
from The Great Debate UK:
Steve Tappin on what makes a CEO tick
Being a CEO should be one of the best jobs in the world, argue the authors of a new book.
"It offers the chance to make a real difference," Steve Tappin and Andrew Cave write in The New Secrets of CEOs: 200 Global Chief Executives on Leading.
"However, real life for most CEOs is tough and many are not enjoying it."
The authors interviewed 200 CEOs for the book, which includes profiles of such leaders as Tesco's Terry Leahy , Avon's Andrea Jung, Xstrata's Mick Davis, Kraft's Irene Rosenfeld, Haier's Zhang Ruimin and Cisco's John Chambers.
CEOs are divided into five "distinct categories" characterised by similar leadership styles.
In the following video interview, Tappin, who heads up the CEO counselling firm Xinfu, discusses some major issues confronting top leaders at global firms since the financial crisis of 2007-2009, and shares his views with Reuters on how BP's Tony Hayward should manage the the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis.
The CEO is the latest endangered species
– Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
The revolving doors are spinning ever faster in the executive suites of corporations.
CEO turnover has reached an all-time high, according to figures kept by recruiting firm Challenger & Gray. Last year, 1,484 U.S. CEOs resigned, stepped down or were fired — six casualties every business day.
Resignation has outpaced retirement as the leading reason for departure, as the credit crunch has dealt a savage blow to prospects for growth and investors grow restive over share dilution, dividend cuts and shrinking outlooks.
High profile departures stretch from the bosses of the global retailer, Carrefour, to computer maker Lenovo to a succession of financial leaders including those at AIG, Merrill and UBS.
Turnover among top executives may even be accelerating as we descend into 2009. Similar defections appear to be occurring around the world, although no one keeps track of exact totals.
Given the public’s newfound lust for revenge against the CEO class, this exodus may provoke little more than a wry smile among anyone struggling to fend off the effects of the credit crunch in their own lives.
One of the biggest sham arguments is that CEO compensation has to be stratospheric because that is the only way to get the best talent. Judging from the business news over the past year, most companies would probably have been far more profitable if they had hired someone willing to get paid a relatively low salary, say 10X the average employee salary, but whose main concern was to help the company. I am a doctor and I think medical schools would do far better taking students who were in the second tier, since first tier students go into medicine mainly to make money.
Are a CEO’s health problems a private matter?
– Dana Radcliffe is a Day Family senior lecturer of business ethics at the Johnson School at Cornell University. The views expressed are his own. —
Are a CEO’s health problems a private matter? Or does he or she have an obligation to disclose them to investors and other stakeholders?
These are questions Apple and its iconic co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs have had to face ever since he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003. Happily, the disease proved to be treatable with surgery, which Jobs underwent in 2004. But shareholders didn’t learn that Apple’s chief had been ill until he sent out an email to employees, announcing that he had had cancer but was now “cured.”
The issue of what, if anything, the company should disclose about its CEO’s health concerns resurfaced last summer, when Jobs spoke at Apple’s annual developers conference. There he appeared, as the New York Times put it, “unusually thin and haggard.” Reacting to the inevitable rumors that Jobs was ill again, the firm’s public relations department reported that he was suffering from “a common bug.”
A PRIVATE MATTER
However, according to the Times’ John Markoff, Jobs told some associates that he was experiencing “nutritional problems.” Moreover, people close to Jobs told Markoff that in early 2008 he had a surgical procedure to treat a problem related to his weight loss. Yet, in July, in a conference call after the release of Apple’s quarterly earnings statement, a senior officer deflected an analyst’s question about Jobs’s health, calling it “a private matter.”
Not surprisingly, investor uncertainty about whether Jobs would be able to continue as CEO was reflected in sharp fluctuations in the price of Apple’s stock. In December, the worries intensified when the company said that Jobs would not give his much-anticipated annual keynote address at Apple’s Macworld conference. At first, the reason offered by a spokesman was that the firm would not take part in the event after 2009. That “explanation” only fueled the rumors.
ABSOLUTELY. A public corporation is not a private entity: all participants in the welfare of the corporation (shareholders, employees) have an obligation to know the details of any integral component, perceived or otherwise. This is quite different from the privacy obligations to, say, a factory line worker.
In an era of obscene corporate compensation for executives, this is part of the price of admission. Get used to it.
You seem to slight the board’s decision and this may due to the fact that neither you nor any of us know enough of the details on Hurd’s systematic and intentional misconduct.
With due respect to your psychic abilities – one thing is evident from this and history that the only thing “scientific” about business is – financial accounting. This is what got AlCapone in trouble and so did Mark Hurd.