The resignation of Mark V. Hurd last week from his seemingly secure post as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard has got to be one of the great head-scratchers in recent times.
Mark Hurd, H.P.'s ex-chief.
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Here’s a guy who walked into a very troubled situation, replacing Carleton S. “It’s All About Me” Fiorina, and oversaw what appears to be a magnificent turnaround. In his five years at H.P., every metric Wall Street uses to judge companies had gone in only one direction: up.
Its 2009 revenue was $115 billion, up from $80 billion when he took over. Four years ago, H.P. even leapt past mighty I.B.M. in revenue, making it the country’s biggest technology company. Its average annual 18 percent profit increases were remarkable given the company’s mammoth size. And the stock price more than doubled on Mr. Hurd’s watch.
Stories about Mr. Hurd lavished praise on his no-nonsense style. H.P. under Mr. Hurd has “become the benchmark for efficiency in an industry known more for its whiz-bang appeal than its operational excellence,” wrote Adam Lashinsky of Fortune in 2009. Four months ago, Forbes put Mr. Hurd on its cover, attributing H.P.’s success to “dramatic cost-cutting” and “a brutalizing culture of accountability.” Even Mr. Hurd’s temporary replacement, the chief financial officer, Cathie Lesjak, who seemed to go out of her way to diss him, said in the press release announcing his resignation that “our ability to execute is irrefutable.” That could never be said during the reign of Queen Carly.
And then, on Aug. 6 — poof! — he was gone, brought low by a sexual harassment scandal.
Or was he? In the press release, H.P. noted that while a claim of sexual harassment had been made, an investigation had cleared him of the charges. Instead, the company alluded vaguely to “violations of H.P.’s standards of business conduct.”
When pressed, H.P. said that Mr. Hurd had fudged some expense reports. (It also said that his relationship with the woman, a small-time H.P. contractor, was a conflict, even if no sex was involved.) On his way out the door, the board handed Mr. Hurd a severance package said to be worth between $40 million and $50 million, which would seem to undercut the notion that he had done something bad.
H.P. says its board should be applauded for not letting Mr. Hurd off the hook. But this is just after-the-fact spin. In fact, the directors should be called out for acting like the cowards they are. Mr. Hurd’s supposed peccadilloes were a smoke screen for the real reason they got rid of an executive they didn’t trust and employees didn’t like.
The stand-up thing would have been to fire Mr. Hurd on the altogether legitimate grounds that the directors didn’t have faith in his leadership. But of course Wall Street would have had a conniption if the board had taken such a step. So instead, it ginned up a tabloid-ready scandal that only serves to bring shame, once again, on the H.P. board.
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Mr. Hurd’s sudden departure from H.P. can be traced, in truth, to the last time the H.P. board did something shameful. That was the infamous “pretexting” scandal, which burst into public view about a year and a half into Mr. Hurd’s tenure. The essential allegation was that the company, led by its board chairwoman, Patricia C. Dunn, had gone way over the line in investigating a series of damaging leaks, including hiring investigators who used false pretenses to obtain phone records of people suspected of being the leakers.
According to “The Big Lie: Spying, Scandal and Ethical Collapse at Hewlett-Packard,” an authoritative account by the former BusinessWeek writer Anthony Bianco, Mr. Hurd was very involved in H.P.’s efforts to hunt down the leakers. After the scandal broke, he hijacked H.P.’s internal investigation, hiring an outside law firm and ordering it to report directly to him, instead of the board, which is the normal practice.
“There is plenty of evidence from H.P.’s own documents that he had a much bigger role in starting the investigations and carrying them out than he ever let on,” Mr. Bianco said. “H.P. security had a SWAT team to root out the leakers. They were clearly trying to please him.”
Ms. Dunn, according to “The Big Lie,” knew about the effort to finger the leakers, getting regular updates from H.P. managers. But she wasn’t the driving force. She wound up taking the fall because the board member who revealed the pretexting, Thomas J. Perkins, the former venture capitalist, had it in for her. So the allegations were skewed to make her look bad.
Ms. Dunn stepped down as chairwoman, replaced by Mr. Hurd. Then, Mr. Hurd forced her off the board entirely, threatening to resign if she stayed. In October 2006, Ms. Dunn, who was also being treated for cancer, was indicted by the California attorney general on identity theft and fraud charges, only to have them tossed out of court five months later.
“There was a residue of mistrust because of the pretexting scandal,” said Mr. Bianco, who added, “I conclude in the book that he lacks the moral character to be C.E.O.”
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