hp 在一連三任 CEO (Carly Fiorina, Patricia Dunn, Mark Hurd)不光彩的去職*後，董事會請了一位精通五國語言前 SAP 的 CEO Léo Apotheker 來掌舵。同時也宣布延請一位前 Oracle 的高階主管 Ray Lane 進入董事會。再回頭看看日前大手筆買下 Palm，看來 hp 積極的往軟體發展。
Remarks:
1. Carly Fiorina, 第一位在 Dow 30 公司任 CEO 的女性。她讓 hp 的市值掉了一半，hp 還付了超過兩千萬美元請她走。
2. Patricia Dunn 雇用私家偵探調查跟蹤董事會成員與記者。
3. Mark Hurd 大手筆裁員，奠定其地位。但傳出與女包商的桃色糾紛。
The Léo Way
Oct 1st 2010, 0:22 by L.S. and M.G. | LONDON AND SAN FRANCISCO
THE ENGLISH translation for the German word “Apotheker” is “pharmacist”. Hewlett-Packard (HP) will no doubt be hoping that its new chief executive, Léo Apotheker, who was unveiled on September 30th, can help heal some of the wounds caused by the abrupt departure of his predecessor, Mark Hurd. There had been much speculation that HP’s board would replace Mr Hurd, who left in August following a fuss over ethical lapses, with an insider. But in the event it has chosen to put its faith in an outsider from Germany who used to run that country’s software behemoth, SAP.
Mr Apotheker will face a series of challenges, including the need to rebuild morale inside HP, which has been badly dented by the Hurd fiasco, and to restore faith in “the HP way”, a style of management that has long emphasised high ethical standards and collegial behaviour.
Although Mr Apotheker’s appointment, which will take effect on November 1st, comes as a surprise, it may be a clever choice. That he was fired as SAP's bossafter less than a year in office does not have to count against him. It says more about the circumstances under which he took the helm at the company in May 2008. With the recession in full swing, he was forced to cut costs sharply and lay off nearly 4,000 employees. This helps explain why an internal survey conducted shortly before his departure showed that only half of SAP’s 50,000 employees still had confidence inits top management, compared with three-quarters a year earlier.
Mr Apotheker also did not make himself many friends among SAP’s customers, particularly the smaller ones in Germany. He tried to push through some tough decisions, perhaps too aggressively. Above all, he insisted on increasing maintenance fees, which customers have to pay to get upgrades and support on products they have previously bought. The plan was scrapped shortly before he left after months of bitter complaints from customers.
Yet Mr Apotheker is hardly a hard-nosed American chief executive in the mould of Mr Hurd, whose brutal approach to cutting costs at HP made some insiders distinctly uncomfortable. He was the first Jewish boss of a big German firm whose parents had escaped the Holocaust. (“If SAP had had a pre-war history, I would never have joined the company,” he once said.) After the Nazis invaded Poland, Mr Apotheker’s parents fled all the way to the Russo-Chinese border. Having never seen a German soldier, they had few qualms about settling in Aachen, near the Belgian border, afterthe war. Mr Apotheker was born there in 1953 and later moved to Antwerp.
His youthful activities did not suggest he would end up as a corporate high-flyer. Sporting a revolutionary’s beard, he organised strikes at his school and had a few run-ins with the police, which cost him a couple of teeth. After school he left for Israel, where he quickly became a “serious man”, studying economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalemand working at the Israeli central bank before returning to Europe forfamily reasons. Unsurprisingly, for someone who speaks five languages fluently, he is resolutely internationalist. (True to this outlook, he will move to Silicon Valley, but keep his home in Paris.)
This unique background may make Mr Apotheker, who says he wants to start his tenure with a “listening tour”, the right man to run HP. What is more, he knows a lot about software, which is HP’s weak spot. And he has some experience managing mergers: in October 2007 he engineered SAP’s purchase of Business Objects, a Franco-American software firm, and saw through its integration. This background will be very useful indeed given that HP has made several billion-dollar acquisitions in recent months.
Yet the appointment also raises some questions. Among them is what Mr Apotheker’s arrival will mean for HP’s fractious relationship with Oracle, SAP’s arch-rival, whose boss, Larry Ellison, recently hired Mr Hurd to help him run the company. Intriguingly, at the same time as it announced Mr Apotheker’s arrival, HP also revealed that Ray Lane, a former Oracle executive andnow a partner at a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is joining its board. Mr Lane stressed in an interview following the announcement of his new role that he sees Oracle as “an important partner” of HP. But he also acknowledged that the firm’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a hardware firm, had made it “more of a competitor” to the company too.
The hiring of Mr Apotheker willalso trigger speculation about further consolidation in the informationtechnology (IT) industry. The sector is going through what experts call“re-verticalisation”, meaning that big IT firms are once again becomingmore vertically integrated. Oracle’s deal with Sun is a good example ofthis. Mr Apotheker’s arrival at HP will no doubt get tongues waggingabout a possible rapprochement between HP and SAP.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/10/hewlett_packard_names_former_sap_boss_apotheker_ceo
The story was taken from the website of The Economist, which is not involved with nor endorse the production of this blog. The copyright remains with The Economist and original owners.
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