Was Hurd an Irreplaceable CEO?
But in choosing to eject Hurd (apparently to preserve the HP brand just as it’s launching Palm-fueled smartphones and tablets), HP’s board made one colossal miscalculation: There really is no obvious candidate who can do what Hurd has done. In expanding from revenue of $87.6 billion in 2005 to an estimated $125 billion this year, Hurd has not only performed a remarkably graceful act of executive triage but he has also managed to convince Wall Street that HP has a strong future. Now that he’s gone, there may well be no managerial magician who can keep pulling off the legerdemain that HP is the destination vendor for corporations in the market for information-technology services. For all the talk about companies like HP justifying their buying binges as creating a “one-stop shop,” I have never once heard a chief information officer or even an IT manager say what they really want from a vendor is a one-stop shop. Wal-Mart’s (WMT) all-in-one approach might work for sweatpants, groceries an
