Hewlett-Packard is expected to name former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman their new CEO, replacing Leo Apotheker. N. Venkat Venkatraman, chairman of the Information Systems Department at BU’s School of Management, offers the following comment:
“The real question is what can Meg Whitman do to undo some of the strategic blunders of the previous CEO?
“It is clear that they cannot back out of the Autonomy purchase at $10B without incurring huge penalties.
“Will she go back on the spin-out of PC business or make minor adjustments? Or will she go the B2B route with software and services that Leo Apotheker has laid out. If she does that, then she is admitting that the strategy was right and that the company simply blundered through in its announcement.
“The market is expecting her to deliver clarity of where HP is going. She needs to do that sooner rather than later.”
Contact Venkatraman at 617-353-7117; venkat@bu.edu; Twitter: @nvenkatraman
