In September 2010, the board of Hewlett-Packard voted to name a new chief executive. According to James B. Stewart of The New York Times, who interviewed several current and former directors, most of the 12 board members had never met the man they were hiring.
The search had begun after the board forced out Mark Hurd that August. Four directors volunteered for the search committee, and some of the others distrusted them from the start. The job also proved a hard sell, Stewart reported: the board had summarily fired its last two chief executives. Among those who said no, according to people involved, was Virginia Rometty of IBM.
The committee narrowed the field to three finalists. No one else on the board was willing to interview them. One committee member favored an internal candidate. Another favored Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, whose record worried other directors. That left Léo Apotheker, who had lasted seven months as chief executive of the German software company SAP and was, Stewart wrote, relatively unknown in Silicon Valley. “We had a joke,” one executive told him. “The code name for the search was Léo Apotheker. Because no one had heard of him.”
Before the final vote, the committee urged the other directors to meet its pick. No one did. One director, Lucille Salhany, tried to slow things down: “No one has ever met him. Are we sure?” Her concerns were brushed aside. “Among the finalists, he was the best of a very unattractive group,” another director said. A board member who hadn’t met him told Stewart: “I admit it was highly unusual. But we were just too exhausted from all the infighting.”
HP announced the appointment on September 30, 2010, effective November 1. Robert Ryan, the board’s lead independent director, called Apotheker “a strategic thinker with a passion for technology, wide-reaching global experience and proven operational discipline,” and said that was “exactly what we were looking for in a CEO.”
On August 18, 2011, HP announced that it would explore spinning off its PC business, which had brought in about $41 billion in fiscal 2010. It would shut down its webOS devices, including the TouchPad tablet, and it offered to buy the British software company Autonomy for £25.50 ($42.11) a share. Critics, Stewart reported, pointed to Apotheker’s little experience in HP’s dominant hardware businesses, such as printers and PCs, and to an inability to communicate effectively.
On September 22, 2011, HP named Meg Whitman, a director since January, as chief executive, and Apotheker stepped down. “The board believes that the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes to successfully execute on the company’s strategy,” said Ray Lane, the chairman. Apotheker had held the job for less than eleven months.