HP Chairman Raymond Lane Steps Down 89
First time accepted submitter gkndivebum writes "The latest casualty from the ill-fated acquisition of British company Autonomy by HP appears to be Raymond Lane, who was recently re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholders. Mr. Lane will remain on the board with shareholder Ralph Whitworth as interim chairman. It will be interesting to see where the 'evolution' of the board as articulated by Mr. Whitworth leads."
58% of the votes (Score:5, Insightful)
Raymond Lane, who was recently re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholders.
Winning an election with 58% of the vote is perfectly fine. Until you realize that he had no opponent. Just like elections in the old Soviet Union or other dictatorships, elections for most boards of directors are a complete fraud. If there is one seat open on the board, there is exactly one candidate.
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Raymond Lane, who was recently re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholders.
Winning an election with 58% of the vote is perfectly fine. Until you realize that he had no opponent. Just like elections in the old Soviet Union or other dictatorships, elections for most boards of directors are a complete fraud. If there is one seat open on the board, there is exactly one candidate.
Not all board elections are run that way.
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Especially at HP, where there is a huge amount of infighting among the board.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/08/500-hp-apotheker/ [cnn.com]
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Re:58% of the votes (Score:5, Insightful)
Winning an election with 58% of the vote is perfectly fine. Until you realize that he had no opponent. Just like elections in the old Soviet Union or other dictatorships, elections for most boards of directors are a complete fraud.
Here's a challenge. Name any sitting dictatorship that won with only 58% of the vote. It's always a win with something like 99.7% of the vote.
There are two big differences here. First, he might not have won. If 4% of those votes had shifted against him, he would be out. That's assuming my understanding of the election system is correct.
Second, the reason he won was because he represented the interests of certain large shareholders who negotiated with other large shareholders in order to secure enough votes to elect him. As long as he continued to represent those interests faithfully, no matter how incompetent or corrupt he might appear to the outside world as a result, they'll continue to sponsor him.
Directors usually do not represent the interests of all shareholders, but the interests of a few large shareholders. That's what people don't get. There's no fraud here. It's just divergent and conflicting interests.
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Unless there was a ballot option to prevent Mr Lane being reelected, he didn't need a majority; technically a single vote would get him reelected.
To win an election you don't need a majority of the votes, you just need more than anyone else.
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Unless there was a ballot option to prevent Mr Lane being reelected, he didn't need a majority; technically a single vote would get him reelected.
To win an election you don't need a majority of the votes, you just need more than anyone else.
That is for regular elections for politicians and such. It is not how this kind of corporate election is run. Usually in these cases, all shareholders are assumed to vote for the incumbent or candidate unless they actually cast a ballot. If you own stock they send you a ballot to return with your choice. Getting 42% of the votes against this guy was actually quite an achievement, and there are probably a lot of people who didn't bother to vote who were counted as voting for him by default. It indicates
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Probably a more appropriate word than "fraud" would be "farce".
It's really amazing (and depressing) that a lot of blind apologists for corporations think that corporations are democracies. They're not, of course. And not just in the sense of "democratic republic".
Directors are elected Soviet-style, it's not one person one vote, it's one share one vote, and on top of everything else, if you don't vote at all, that usually gets counted as a "for" vote. At least in the Soviet Union you had to show up and cast
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One share one vote is democracy. In politics, each human counts, because each human has a stake; in business, each share counts, because you can have different stakes. (Of course, that doesn't count the electoral college etc.) It's the "default is you agree" instead of "no vote means no vote" that makes it autocratic.
demo-
a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, where it meant “people” ( democratic ); on this model, used in the formation of compound words ( demography ).
So no. Feel free to find an equivalent term for "share-ocracy". My Greek doesn't extend that far.
Pedantry aside, however, what I was lamenting is that too many people think that corporate voting actually is a literal democratic vote and forget that not all people have the same number of shares. Or, for that matter, that all shares are directly owned by people.
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Or, for that matter, that all shares are directly owned by people.
OK, I'll grant you that it's not "demo"cracy, but I maintain my more general point that it IS an equal vote for an equal stake in the outcome, and as such is fair and open - perhaps fairer than the broken supposedly-democratic system in the US.
Your new point is also very important - the largest blocks of shares are *not* directly owned by people, but by mutual funds and retirement funds and things like that. Each individual person in that fund might have chosen to vote one way if they had control of the
In Soviet Russia (Score:1)
HP steps on YOU!!!
Not the Board. (Score:2, Funny)
At HP its actually Chairman of the Plank.
Needed to be done (Score:5, Informative)
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The NY Times story says that Vanguard voted to reelect the entire slate of directors.
I'm a satisfied customer of Vanguard's and love their service for individual customers, but have to admit that they're part of the problem when it comes to wildly overpaid CEO's and entrenched board members. Simply put, the performance of individual corporations doesn't matter to mutual fund companies with indexed or broad based investing strategies like Vanguard - if they do better, then so do all their mutual fund compet
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To be an activist is a labor intensive activity. If you do not own 10% of the outright company, the board might not listen, regardless of the merit of your arguments. The very low loads Vanguard prides itself on argues against making the attempt.
For the bigger funds, it is not practical to dump a stock simply because it is run by doofuses. The bigger funds are usually growing funds, they just opt to stop buying more stock in that company.
Competently run mutual funds have an idea of the price point where
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It's not magic how this works. Directors usually represent the interests of one or more large shareholders each and the large shareholders negotiate with each other to get enough votes for the entire board. The board got reelected because its purpo
Dont you mean he Jumps... (Score:2)
Then floats down on a golden parachute while contributing nothing of value to the company?
Re:Dont you mean he Jumps... lead parachute (Score:2)
they leave. get nothing.
Frankly, for those people, they don't get paid much for being a board member either. For someone who makes over $100,000,000 a year. A job that pays $100,000 a day, but only pays for 4 days a year is a pittance. It's about power, and control.
Stepping down means admitting he's a loser!
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No, the ones who are there for profit instead of for a personal or social goal such as saving mankind or reaching the moon, leave and step into another place where they can use the insider knowledge and "broker deals" to their personal advantage They can also clean up on insider knowledge spread among the boards of several companies they represent, passing the insider tips in trades so each board member can avoid trading their own company stocks directly.
If you think I'm kidding, try being a waitress at a
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For someone who makes over $100,000,000 a year. A job that pays $100,000 a day, but only pays for 4 days a year is a pittance
Are there really that many people who earn over $100m a year? Seriously?
Anyone else remember? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone else remember when HP was run by engineers? I do. Back then, people wanted to buy their products and wanted to buy their stock. This is a direct hint to HP.
Wish I had kept some of my old test gear, HP-201 audio generator, a spectrum analyzer, etc etc... still have the Tektronix scope tho. 50 years later and it still works fine. (used to do a lot of audio work)
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The equipment I have is from before Agilent. I never had any respect for them, compared to the old HP. And yes it still works just fine. Getting harder to find tho.
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Re:Anyone else remember? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone else remember when HP was run by engineers?
I am not sure there is a company where transition from engineer lead to financial lead produced any benefit to the products. And bad products push companies in death spiral.
Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
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Does that apply to countries too?
Of course. That is basically what Keynes pointed out.
Countries grow when their politicians care about reducing unemployment and putting workers to productive use. Countries stagnate when the politicians only care about the stock market looking good.
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Marx was a pretty good observer, but he was horribly wrong when it came to effecting change. After the demise of Marxism, ideologues on the right effectively rewrote history so no one would question the intrinsic failings of predatory capitalism. They falsely claimed that since the left was defeated capitalism had no flaws.
In the US, the regulatio
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As a Venezuelan, and descendant of Spaniard republican refugees, I can not agree more with you. But Pinochet was Chilean. As a child I had to suffer Chile's madness and as a grown up Venezuela's dive in to social schizophrenia. So, IMHO, what happens with HP's board of directors, is a small version of the group irrationality and a consequence of still unknown forces (chaos?). As you say, we have good descriptions but we don't know what is really going on.
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Pinochet was from Chile.
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Marx was a pretty good observer, but he was horribly wrong when it came to effecting change
I came to that exact same conclusion, that Marx gives us great concepts to understand the situation, but proposed bad solutions : Dictatorship of proletariat replaces oppression by another oppression. It cannot bring a legitimate power. And socialization of the means of production by the state means the state must organize everything, which pushes again toward oppression.
However, Marx still has many things to tell us. When people talk about the 1%, this is marxism reinvented
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Pure engineer view leads to products that can do impossible things, but are hard to use and look bad( Nokia anyone? ). Pure marketing leads to products that look good, are easy to use, easy to sell, but don't really do anything right ( iPhone, i'm looking at you ). Pure bean counters will keep doing the last thing the company did and do it better, faster, cheaper, with more profits. For a while, or untill competition kills them off with new products.
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Except that pure marketing won't get you beyond the first
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I am not sure there is a company where transition from engineer lead to financial lead produced any benefit to the products. And bad products push companies in death spiral.
Yup, but the average stock analyst doesn't really understand how to make products, but they certainly understand MBA-speak.
That's the problem with most big US corporations. Sure, MBAs have a valuable role in a company, but they're aren't the ones that create wealth. The most they can really accomplish is improving efficiency. Well, companies don't become great by being efficient - they become great by delivering a product people want to buy. Sometimes efficiency is a part of that product (Walmart, Amazo
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Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
- management should be just for profit, companies exist to generate profit, if they don't, they should be liquidated.
The problem with HP and with so many other companies is that they are not for profit themselves, they are part of the financial shell game played by government money printers. What some call 'unsustainable growth expectation' really is an attempt at getting some profit above the real inflation rate and the real inflation rate is very high, so what do you expect a company to do to cover the
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- management should be just for profit, companies exist to generate profit, if they don't, they should be liquidated
A company can have a positive income, reinvest everything and make zero profit. There is no reason why it should be liquidated for such a situation. Of course shareholders would be unhappy — except if the shareholders are the company employees themselves, because they have already been paid through salaries.
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zero profit means zero development, zero re-investment and no return at all.
If you are going to build a business, invest in it (as for example you imply equal share employees would in this case), why would you want your money to be stuck in a zero profit place, which clearly means you are losing money due to government created inflation? Why wouldn't you rather invest in a business that actually made profits? If you are vested in a business you want it to grow, to become more efficient.
If you can't make p
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NO, I do not miss your point. The salaries are based on their original investment, which they had to provide in order to have that business. You are saying they are the equal shareholders, so they put together the company.
No company survives if it does not make profit, that's the simple answer. A company that does not make profit and just covers its costs and is always kept at 0 is a company that will be outcompeted by some other company.
What do you think a business owner does with the return on his investm
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What do you think a business owner does with the return on his investment? The more substantial is the return, the less of it he consumes and the more of it he reinvests.
A company can reinvest its profits, but once it is given to shareholders, nothing forces the investor to reinvest within the same company
There is always a way to reduce costs
And most of the time this involves decreasing salaries or making employees working more to produce the same wealth. I suggest an alternative, which is to destroy shareholders profits. And I introduced you with the employees ownership that makes it possible. Some kind of marxism-enabled capitalism (or is it capitalism-ware marxism?)
A profit is also a buffer that allows a company to survive in the bad years
No problem with that.
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A company can reinvest its profits, but once it is given to shareholders, nothing forces the investor to reinvest within the same company
- why should something force somebody to do anything?
Besides, if a company provides a good return on investment compared to other businesses, why wouldn't an investor prefer that company (except for being diligent of-course and not putting all eggs into one basket, haven't you learnt to do that yet?)
And most of the time this involves decreasing salaries or making employees working more to produce the same wealth.
- IF a company can manage to do this in the free market then it is a GOOD thing.
All goods, services, input costs, land, capital, labour, all of these have their price.
Price of capital is the relation of time p
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There are too many points in your message, I will only reply on the most important one IMO
- why should something force somebody to do anything?
For the sake of the general interest. For instance, you are not allowed to dump your garbage wherever you want because this is an annoyance to other people. When free market means a nuisance for 99% of the population, then regulation is legitimate.
- IF a company can manage to do this in the free market then it is a GOOD thing. (...) Price of labour is not dictated by a company, it's a negotiation process between company and labourers.
Negotiation between companies and many workers is asymetrical, you know that very well. Minimum wage is a regulation on free market for rebalancing powers between companies a
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For the sake of the general interest
- the only legitimate 'general interest' is the interest that arises spontaneously and voluntarily in the market. You are bringing up concept of 'collective good', which is exactly the concept used by all dictatorial powers, regardless what precise ideology they subscribe to, they are collectivist in the message, they are anti-individualist, anti-humanist, anti-capitalist, anti-free market (which means they are against sound economics and rule of law).
Your goals cannot be noble if your means are not noble,
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Oh and by the way, this:
There are too many points in your message
- there is only one message: individual freedom.
Your message is slavery by the collective.
Individual freedom is what I want, I want people to be able to succeed because of their ability to invest and work, I want them to succeed to their maximum potential, I want them to become as wealthy doing it as they humanly can.
I want the people who do not engage in business themselves to be able to access the majority of goods and services at lowest prices that a free economy can provide.
Tha
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- there is only one message: individual freedom.
Your message is slavery by the collective.
Do you now French Republic motto? Liberté, egalité, fraternité. It is the key to go beyond the opposition between individual freedom and collective oppression.
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Do you now French Republic motto
- I know it, I visit France once in a while. This motto can be understood properly if translated from the Orwellian doublespeak into human language this way:
Liberté - entitlement to products and services that others are forced to provide to the mob. This really means entitlement for some and legalised theft with the violence of the State to provide this subsidy.
Egalité - discrimination against some to achieve supposed 'equality' for others. You can't achieve equality of outcomes if
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This motto can be understood properly if translated from the Orwellian doublespeak into human language(...) Fraternité - class warfare
I think you miss something by interpreting french republic motto while looking at today's France political situation, while it has to be understood within the context of its inception. This makes you stretch a lot enlightenment thinking, which led to the motto, in order to serve your point. Class warefare is a valuable marxist concept, but by using it there, you use Marx to reinterpret Rousseau, while the former did not read the later, and kept power legitimacy in a blind spot just because of that.
Let me ta
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I think you miss something by interpreting french republic motto while looking at today's France political situation, while it has to be understood within the context of its inception.
- actually it's not me, you missed something if you are going to use the original idea behind that cry to arms.
If you are talking about the original, then you missed the last part: ou la mort.
I am obviously using the modern understanding of that slogan and that's what the modern understanding is:
Welfare entitlement, discrimination, class warfare. Actually I would return the original part about death as well.
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I am obviously using the modern understanding of that slogan and that's what the modern understanding is:
And this is just not what I was talking about. In other words, you are unwilling or unable to consider my point. But I can try another way: what is a nation for you?
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Are you talking about this:
Let me take another example: do you see class warefare there?
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal Declaration on Human Rights, article 1)
What do I see in this?
There are 2 versions of what I see based on the definition of what a 'right' is and what 'equal' means.
AFAIC a right is protection against government abuse of an individual, nothing else. So a right to private property is protection of individual's private property against claims by the collective.
'Equal' means equal before law without the law treating some people differently than others, so equal treatment by government without discrimination.
So if you take
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True equality under the law would mean everyone having equal non-exclusive rights to all property. The only true property rights that exist are those which are backed by force. Government protecting "your" property effectively makes it their property, which is indistinguishable from communism.
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AFAIC a right is protection against government abuse of an individual, nothing else.
Does that means you take position against inheritance rights? Let us imagine the state takes all your belongings after you death, leaving nothing for your children. You are not abused since you are no more. Your children are not abused since that wealth were not theirs. I do not advocate for such an extreme inheritance regime, but I wonder how your narrow definition of right will fit here.
The part about 'brotherhood' only means to me: do onto others as you would want others to do to you.
At least! This means you agree that means there is a limit to your freedom, right?
As to what a 'nation' is, it's a set of people found in close territorial proximity from each other
You are confusing the country and the
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individual freedom results in wealth creation and it takes wealthy individuals and thus a wealthy society to be able to take care of the ecosystem.
This seemed to me so obviously wrong that I did reply at that time, but since I have a few minutes this morning: A quick search on your favorite search engine will show a correlation between a country wealth and its impact on the ecosystem. Take greenhouse gas emissions vs GDP, for instance, the correlation is quite good.
There should be no surprise there, since free market does not take into account the negative impact on the ecosystem. Economic actors have no interest of taking care of it.
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Does that means you take position against inheritance rights?
- the owner of property is in his right to transfer his property to whoever he sees fit, at that point the property (like in all other transactions) belongs to the people who are now in possession of that property.
In fact if you read this comment of mine [slashdot.org], you will see that I think that the problem with short term thinking in companies is that they have no owners and the large part of that problem is created by death taxes (and inflation of-course, which is also theft of property, of savings).
At least! This means you agree that means there is a limit to your freedom, right?
- you mean th
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Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
Management for profit is a simple requirement for company survival--all it means is that you manage the enterprise such that the value that it is able to generate and capture as a result of its operations exceeds its share of the cost burden of its operations. You're conflating sacrificing long-term viability for short-term gains with management for profit, or perhaps confusing managing for what is profitable for specific individuals with what is profitable for the corporation.
That being said, there are se
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Management just for profit means destroying companies in the long term.
Management for profit is a simple requirement for company survival . . .
Three posters missed the point - JUST for profit. Agreed, of course a company must profit to survive. Remember, though, the heyday of Japanese growth two or three decades ago, when people pointed out that Japanese companies would trade profit to get market share, and Japanese executives and politicians would all speak of the longer term position in their industries.
MBAs want to make more profit NOW. Not just this quarter, or this month, but NOW. And they don't care if it's only on paper, or only stea
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You are not the GP, but you're making the same mistake. "Just for profit" != "profit NOW" Also, you are conflating the motivations of individuals within the company with the purpose management of a company in and of itself.
MBAs want to make more profit NOW. Not just this quarter, or this month, but NOW. And they don't care if it's only on paper, or only stealing sales figures from tomorrow. They will play a shell game to look better in the short run without producing anything.
By your own words, that is not managing for profit, it's managing "to look better". Managing in a way that deliberately compromises or destroys an institution's ability to continue generating profit is by definition not managing "just for profit".
The reality is that many engineers do t
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Management for profit is a simple requirement for company survival--all it means is that you manage the enterprise such that the value that it is able to generate and capture as a result of its operations exceeds its share of the cost burden of its operations.
I realize english seems to use the same word "profit" for two things. Am I right here? This is a source of confusion.
French has "bénéfices" vs "profits" to distinguish the two things. There is a big difference, which is investment. Management just for shareholder gains does not care about investment. In fact it does not care about company survival either: you can make money by selling all company assets and then go bankrupt. This is a quite
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The second concept you listed--wealth given to shareholders--is return on investment, not profit. Whether that return on investment is in fact amounts to profits for those shareholders is a different matter.
Also, you have to be careful to distinguish profits generated for some entity other than the business (e.g., shareholders, employees, customers, etc.) vs. the business itself being profitable. Put another way, managing a business to be profitable is an entirely different matter from managing the busine
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Whether that return on investment is in fact amounts to profits for those shareholders is a different matter.
Wow. Apparently my brain simply does not function properly in the morning before I've had caffeine.
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Put another way, managing a business to be profitable is an entirely different matter from managing the business to generate profits for certain stakeholders.
Which is exactly what I meant, minus the "profit" translation issue. Businesses have to be profitable, but management just to generate profit for shareholders will destroy the company.
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Any management decisions that sacrifice the overall or long-term viability of the business for short-term benefit do not, in fact, generate profit (or minimize losses) for shareholders with the exception of the case where management has determined that the business itself is no longer economically viable and winding it down is the only way to avoid throwing more good money after bad.
Even if management is able to pump the stock price temporarily, if that is done at the expense of the fundamentals of the core
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I am not sure there is a company where transition from engineer lead to financial lead produced any benefit to the products. And bad products push companies in death spiral.
What about the Microsoft transition from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer or Apple and its transition to John Sculley? Oh wait, bad examples.
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Many, many years ago I worked as purchasing officer for a large research organisation. HP used to publish a magazine that showcased their latest equipment, usually describing the engineering that went into it in great detail. Within days of the magazine hitting the desks of our engineers we would get requests for these new gadgets, which HP was able to provide from local stock -- in Australia. That always impressed our engineers.
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I bought my first HP-33C from 1978. It was indestructible. Now I am afraid of all HP products especially their printer software. What happen ? Some shark bought the company for its reputation, started to produce low quality and ride on the name. The original founders were not happy about that.
Greed. Suck the most profit in the short term
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Read "The Silicon Boys"
or if you like sailing "Mine is Bigger"
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Not necessarily. The old 'scope only goes up to a few megahertz. New electronics is in the GHz range. The old scope is therefore only good for AM radio and audio work anymore.
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HP is a mess (Score:5, Insightful)
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too busy to focus on actually running a technology company
That's okay, HP isn't a technology company anymore. HP is a cut price consumer electronics manufacturer. With the related level of interest in HP's products, a squabbling bunch of babies does just as well as the most brilliant leadership money can buy.
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Absolute BS. I have found almost nothing to complain about in HP's very recent management (post Apotheker debacle and post overpaying for Autonomy, reportedly ignoring the CFOs strong objections at the time). Many investosr agree, which is why the stock has seen nearly vertical growth YTD.
The consumer market is only one (decreasingly important) segment of HP's business, and the company's recent investments and changes are clearly pushing the other segments for growth. And furthermore, those managed switc
RaymondLane Steps Down (Score:1)
HP's Elop (Score:5, Interesting)
The person operating HP's business from day to day isn't named "Meg". HP's Chief Operating Officer is Microsoft's former Windows Business guy named Bill Veghte. Bill Veghte has operational control of HP and Meg Whitman is his PR meatpuppet: a figurehead with zero actual operational responsibility, just like she likes it.
You haven't heard about this because we're all familiar with how Microsoft is sending out its former executives like Elop and Veghte to wrest operational control of their partners' operations to try and main control of their Wintel PC ecosystem and regain some fraction of the control they had back when they were the 800lb gorilla on the field. Veghte is running HP on the down low. Any day now they'll get control of Dell too through an LBO. A fat lot of good that will do them: we're tired of this Machiavellian bullshit and the prevention of progress it sustains. HP and Dell together don't make even HTC, let alone a Samsung. Microsoft and all their still-loyal partners together don't make an Apple, let alone an Apple + IBM + Google + Samsung. Microsoft is not only not even no longer the king of the technology hill: they're playing king of the one-of-many foothills.
They have 2 options (Score:2)
or
2. go bankrupt