But travesties like this at HP are the reason that socialist and populist nonsense is so strong. Over at
ZDNet:
For HP, fiscal 2011 was the year of two CEOs—Leo Apotheker and Meg
Whitman—and it cost the company dearly.
In
its proxy statement filed Friday, HP outlined the compensation packages for
its relatively new CEO and the parting gift for Apotheker.
The damage? Whitman took a salary of $1 for fiscal 2011 and option awards
worth $16.15 million. Toss in other competition and the grand total comes to
$16.52 million rounded.
And then there’s Apotheker, who wrestled with strategy, communications and a
decision whether to spin off HP’s PC unit. Simply put, the Apotheker reign was a
disaster.
However, that disaster was $30.41 million in total compensation. Apotheker
landed $1.15 million in salary, $6.4 million in bonus, $17.66 million in stock
awards and another $5.2 million in other. Apotheker made a bundle for just a few
months work.
I would have a hard time defending those compensation packages if Apotheker and Whitman had done a crackerjack job as CEO. The amount of money is really quite obscene: Apotheker was there for a few
months, and received more than $30 million--and neither of these have done anything but continue making HP a laughing stock. And this is not the first time HP's board has given really extravagant parting compensation. Empress Carly received a obscenely large severance package and they
fired her.
If Whitman cannot fix HP, it's a dead company walking, diseased, ungovernable. She's not a megalomaniacal clown like Florina.
ReplyDeleteWhere can I get a job like that?
ReplyDeleteThe first comment is worth paying attention to: when a company is so messed up (one of the highest initial priorities of the ousted guy was cutting the bureaucracy so that salesmen could spend more than 30% of their time actually selling (don't laugh, Xerox almost killed themselves when their's got down to 10% (sic))), with an epically bad board of directors (remember, they installed and supported Florina and at least the pre-merger strategy, and that's before you consider their later criminal spying actions and I forget what else (well, e.g. a Chairwoman more interested in proper procedure than saving the company)), you're just not going to get obviously good people (Apotheker was clearly a dud from the start, Whitman is a moon shot given her background) and you're going to have to pay whoever you get a lot, including a lot if it doesn't work out. Especially to someone like Apotheker who's going to find it very difficult to get similar work afterwords if things don't work out.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really common pattern in seriously messed up companies.