Who Pushed Out Mark Hurd? A Look at H-P's Board

Hewlett-Packard's HPQ board of directors may read like a Who's Who of Corporate America, but its decision to push out CEO Mark Hurd has been the subject of much second-guessing. So it's worth taking a look at who makes up H-P's board; after all, they were the ones behind the controversial change at the top, and they will ultimately have final say in choosing someone else to lead the world’s largest technology company. The board of the tech heavyweight has come under plenty of fire for its handling of Hurd, who was widely respected in Silicon Valley for turning around H-P, but shocked the industry last week by stepping down for filing inaccurate expense reports. The board said the expense reports were designed to hide a “close personal relationship” with a contractor, Jodie Foster, but H-P said Hurd didn’t violate its sexual-harassment policy and Fisher denied having “an affair or intimate sexual relationship.” Some say the punishment didn’t fit the publicly-stated crime of fudging expense reports, especially given how valuable Hurd was seen as being to H-P. In the wake of the Hurd ouster, the company’s stock lost nearly $9 billion of value on Monday, its worst one-day selloff in almost six years. Oracle ORCL CEO Larry Ellison, a powerful figure in Silicon Valley, slammed the H-P board on Monday. In an email to The New York Times, Ellison said the board “made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple AAPL board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.” Others defend the board, saying there may be more evidence of misacting than meets the eye and that it was simply treating Hurd the way it would if it discovered a similar misdeed by an employee. Two figures on H-P’s board stand out. Robert Ryan serves as the board’s lead independent director, which is an especially powerful watchdog position in companies like H-P that have one person serving as both CEO and chairman. To read the rest, head over to FOX Business.