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On a single day in September 2011, HP fired a CEO whose employment had commenced less than eleven months earlier, and replaced him with a fellow board member — one who had joined the board months after he was hired.39 The departing executive walked out with a $7.2M cash severance, $3.56M in accelerated stock, and a $2.4M bonus on top.4 By then the company's running tab for cashiering chief executives had crossed $83 million.7 The thing to notice is who signed every one of those checks. It was the same group of people each time — and they were never on the way out.
The official story is that HP had a CEO problem: a string of leaders who couldn't get the job done. That story is upside down. HP had at least three clear forced exits across a decade, and the only constant across all of them wasn't the person in the corner office. It was the board that kept hiring the person in the corner office — and then deciding, on its own shifting standards, that it had made a mistake.
Four exits, one author
Look at the departures one at a time and each has a tidy cause. Carly Fiorina: the Compaq merger underperformed. Mark Hurd: an ethics violation. Léo Apotheker: a collapsing stock and a botched strategy. Lay them side by side and the tidy causes dissolve, because they have nothing in common — except the body that pulled the trigger every time. A merger verdict, an expense-report scandal, and a strategic-credibility collapse are three completely different failure modes. A board that produces all three in a decade isn't unlucky in its hires. It's unreliable in its judgment — both when it hires and when it fires.
Read the firings backward and the board appears
The Hurd episode is the clearest tell, because HP documented its own contradiction. The board investigated a sexual-harassment claim, concluded in writing that its policy was not violated, and then forced Hurd out anyway — on inaccurate expense reports.2 That is a board reaching for the exit and then hunting for a reason it can put in a press release. The same pattern shadows Fiorina: the popular memory is that she resigned, but the SEC filing shows a severance agreement executed the day before the announcement1 — the paperwork of a removal dressed as a departure. In both cases the official cause is a respectable shell built around the real one, which was simpler: the board had lost confidence and didn't trust its own machinery enough to say so plainly.
“The investigation found no violation of HP's sexual harassment policy, but did find violations of HP's Standards of Business Conduct.”2
Apotheker exposes the front end of the same failure. He was hired from outside, and HP cut its financial outlook repeatedly before the stock fell roughly 40% on his watch and the board removed him.7 A search process that can produce a sub-eleven-month chief executive isn't vetting candidates — it's gambling on them. And the gamble had a fixed cost regardless of outcome: Apotheker's severance terms were written into his employment agreement at the moment of hire,9 so the worse the hire, the more the firing paid. The contract guaranteed that bad judgment about people would be expensive to reverse.
| CEO | The stated reason | The constant |
|---|---|---|
| Fiorina | Merger and financial underperformance | The board lost confidence and removed her |
| Hurd | Expense reports / conflict of interest | The board chose to oust, then found a cause |
| Apotheker | Strategy collapse, falling stock | The board hired him, then fired him in under a year |
| Every time | A different, respectable headline | The same directors signing the severance |
Isn't a company allowed to fire bad CEOs?
The fair objection is that removing a failing chief executive is exactly what a good board is supposed to do — and some of these leaders were genuinely struggling. True. But the strongest version of that defense actually convicts the board. The Hurd investigation found no harassment violation yet still ended his tenure2; the standard moved to fit the verdict the board had already reached. And a board that earns credit for the firing must also own the hiring: many of the directors who decided Apotheker had to go were the ones who had approved his hire less than a year before — even as new members, including Whitman herself, had joined the board in the interim.39 You cannot praise a board's decisiveness in the exit while excusing its recklessness in the entrance — they are the same hand. Good governance isn't measured by how cleanly you fire. It's measured by how rarely you have to.
Even the 2015 split carries the fingerprints. HP didn't divide into two clean equals — Hewlett-Packard Company renamed itself HP Inc. and spun off Hewlett Packard Enterprise, an asymmetric carve-up that scattered the leadership it had left across two cap tables.6 The succession problem wasn't solved. It was distributed.
A run of failures with a single shared element rarely lives in the part that changes — it lives in the part that stays. Three different CEO 'reasons' across a decade can't share a root cause in the CEOs; they're too different. They can only share one in the constant: the board that selected and removed each one. The diagnostic move is brutal and simple. List the failures, strip away their distinct headline causes, and ask what survived every purge untouched. The thing still standing after everyone else has been fired is usually the thing that should have been examined first. At HP, the CEOs kept changing. The succession risk never moved.
Fifteen years after Hurd, the door was still spinning. In February 2026, HP Inc.'s CEO Enrique Lores stepped down — this time to pursue another opportunity, the filing was careful to say — and the board named one of its own members interim chief and opened yet another search.5 A different decade, a different cause, the same reflex: when the seat empties, reach inward, appoint a director, start the hunt again. HP spent more than a decade and $83 million learning that you cannot fire your way to a stable CEO when the instability is sitting in the boardroom. The revolving door was never the problem. It was just the symptom you could see — and the people watching it spin were the ones turning it.
Succession Readiness Scorecard
A scorecard that turns 'we'll figure out succession later' into a number you can argue with. It rates the four things that decide whether a handover lands — bench strength, board alignment, knowledge transfer, and whether the incumbent can actually let go. Blank to grade your own readiness honestly; filled as the worked example diagnosing why the story's company was (or wasn't) ready when the moment came.
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Sources
Where this comes from — the filings, records, and reporting behind it.
- 1Carly Fiorina served as HP CEO July 19 1999 – February 9 2005; a Severance Agreement and Release was executed between HP and Fiorina on February 8 2005, the day before her departure was publicly announced.
- 2Mark Hurd resigned as Chairman, CEO and President of HP on August 6 2010, effective immediately; the investigation found NO violation of HP's sexual harassment policy but found inaccurate expense reports and undisclosed conflict of interest, constituting violations of HP's Standards of Business Conduct.
- 3Léo Apotheker was terminated as President and CEO of HP, effective immediately, on September 22 2011; Margaret C. Whitman was elected President and CEO by the Board on the same date.
- 4Apotheker's separation agreement (executed September 28 2011) entitled him to a $7.2M severance payment, accelerated vesting of 156,000 restricted shares valued at ~$3.56M, 424,000 PRUs, and a $2.4M annual bonus.
- 5Enrique Lores stepped down as President, CEO, and Board member of HP Inc. on February 3 2026 'to pursue another professional opportunity'; Board member Bruce Broussard was appointed Interim CEO effective immediately and a CEO Search Committee was formed.
- 6The 2015 split was structured so that Hewlett-Packard Company renamed itself HP Inc. and spun off Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Meg Whitman became CEO of HPE, Dion Weisler became CEO of HP Inc. (November 2 2015 – November 1 2019); Enrique Lores succeeded Weisler as HP Inc. CEO November 2 2019.
- 7HP's board ousted Apotheker after the stock dropped ~40% in his tenure and the company cut its financial outlook three times; CNN Money reported the CEO revolving door had cost HP more than $83M in severance, including $25M+ owed to Apotheker.
- 8HP had $42.4B in revenues and $3.1B in net earnings in 1999 (when Fiorina arrived); by 2005 (when she was ousted), revenues were $86.7B but net earnings had fallen to $2.4B. HP stock plunged by nearly half during her tenure and rose again after she was fired.
- 9HP's Board of Directors elected Léo Apotheker as President and CEO effective November 1, 2010; the employment agreement dated September 29, 2010 sets out his severance and termination benefits as part of his initial terms of hire.