Meg Whitman, Crucible

My article from an old Media & Tech blog (September 23rd 2011)

Meg Whitman

Carly Fiorina. Robert Wayman. Mark Hurd. Cathie Lesjak. Léo Apotheker. Including those in an interim capacity, Meg Whitman is the 6th to occupy the coveted corner office at HP in the last 6 years.

Musical chairs? Revolving door? It looks that way, doesn’t it.

Aaron Ricadela writes in Meg Whitman replaces Léo Apotheker as CEO at HP:

Whitman is credited for her role in building eBay into the world’s largest Internet auctioneer with a market value of about $40 billion. She took the company public and pioneered e-commerce for small businesses. Yet in the final years of her tenure, she couldn’t arrest a slowdown in sales growth and overpaid for Skype Technologies after a bidding war with Google and Yahoo. EBay later wrote down Skype’s value.

Whitman’s challenge will be to boost revenue while assuaging investors whose dismay fueled a 47 percent plunge in HP stock under Apotheker. But some analysts are already saying that her experience at consumer-oriented companies such as eBay, Procter & Gamble and Hasbro may leave her ill equipped to run HP’s business-computing divisions.

So she comes with really good, albeit imperfect, track record at the helm.  And the pressure is on.

Back on 11th May 2005, I wrote the following in my business journal: The more I read about Meg Whitman, head of e-Bay, the more I want to learn about – and emulate – her leadership. A polite, very unassuming, even self-effacing lady, she has truly engineered a quirky internet site into a global powerhouse, doing so in the midst of the most dramatic boom-and-bust cycle in technology. In brief, not only does she understand her people in the broadest and again most unassuming sense of the word, but also she understands her business and what it truly takes to make it successful.

She’s been mostly out of the spotlight in recent years. Still, I admire this lady, and so do many others in the business.

The question is, Does she have what it takes to halt the musical-chairs, revolving-door farce at HP? More pointedly, Does she have what it takes vis-a-vis what HP needs her for? In HP Playing Musical CEOs Again? Chairman Ray Lane offers a clear message on what HP would like to become, that is, more of a software, IT and services company.

Ray Lane

This is an enormous task. It’s a literal transformation of the long-storied focus on hardware for HP. Of course only time will tell whether she will succeed, but Whitman has a lot going in her favor. However, her success is partly dependent on our expectations. Who do I mean by “our”? We observers, consumers, analysts, Board of Directors, her people et al., all of us must be reasonable and realistic about what she can do in a certain period of time.

President Barack Obama has taken quite a beating in the media and the public in the past several months, as the US economy continues to suffer. When he won the elections in late 2008, and took office in early 2009, the world cried with tears of joy at the hope and courage this one man signified. But I cautioned my close friends here in Dubai to be realistic about what he can do. He was inheriting quite a devastating mess from the previous administration. I cringed when people hailed him as if he were the President of the World. Look, he’s only a human being, I said. He’s not endowed with any miraculous powers. What’s more, he was entering the high office with relatively little political experience.

The verdict is still out of course on whether his presidency is a success or a failure, the diminishing confidence levels notwithstanding. But matched against the world’s impossibly high expectations, then he is undoubtedly a failure, as any president would be. In the complex melange of human sentiments, I’m sure these expectations of ours weigh in on President Obama’s struggles.

HP is nowhere near the breath, depth and complexity of the US, as an organization, but I think the caution I gave to my friends three years ago are relevant in Whitman’s case. We must be reasonable and realistic about what she can do, as one human being in a very difficult spot. By “we,” I mean most particularly the Board and the analysts on Wall Street.

As one friend asked on LinkedIn, Does HP have what it takes to survive? Even if Whitman were the best leader in the world, does the organization itself have what it takes to succeed, in terms of its structure, products, people etc.?

It remains to be seen.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD