I’m speechless,” Larry Ellison said last week about the appointment of Leo Apotheker as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Only it turned out the Oracle chief wasn’t speechless at all. He had rather a lot to say and
e-mailed various newspapers to protest that HP had chosen “a guy who was recently fired because he did such a bad job of running SAP”, adding, “the HP board needs to resign en masse”.
Two days later, Jack Welch turned out not to be speechless either when it came to rubbishing the appointment. The HP board had “committed sins”, he said. “They end up blowing up the CEOs and don’t have anyone else in mind to come in. Where the hell was the leadership development? Who are these board members?”