How trouble in the boardroom led to bad decisions at HP

BOOK REVIEW: The Big Lie: Spying, Scandal and Ethical Collapse at Hewlett-Packardby Anthony Bianco Public Affairs, 356pp,£16.99

THE TITLE of this book might suggest it’s a rapidly written tome about the recent resignation of HP chief executive Mark Hurd.

Last month, Hurd, despite having overseen a turnaround in HP’s fortunes, tendered his resignation following allegations of sexual harassment of a contractor and his acceptance that he had claimed personal expenses as business ones.

Instead The Big Lieis a forensic examination of the fall-out from the departure of Carly Fiorina,

Hurd’s predecessor as chief executive. Fiorina, unlike Hurd, was fired by HP’s board who lost confidence in her as the company’s share price languished and it struggled to digest Compaq, the rival whose multi-billion dollar acquisition was pushed through by the chief executive despite her board’s doubts.

Prior to the Hurd resignation, this forensic examination of the events around Fiorina’s dismissal, and the scapegoating of company chairman Patricia Dunn, following an overly aggressive investigation of boardroom leaks which became known as Spygate, would have had limited appeal outside of current and former HP staff.

The story focuses on the central players in that saga – Dunn, legendary Silicon Valley investor Tom Perkins and George Keyworth, a loyalist of company founder Dave Packard.

Anthony Bianco, a veteran BusinessWeekreporter, digs deep into the background of these characters to explain their motivation.

He also draws heavily on the transcripts of a subsequent House of Representatives investigation, as well as interviews with the main players, to explain how a company which had always prided itself on treating people ethically ended up being exposed for spying on its own board members and journalists covering HP.

It is hard for the reader not to feel sympathy for Dunn, who worked her way to the top at hedge fund manager Barclays Global Investors before becoming HP chairman. Over the period covered by The Big Lie, Dunn was treated for two forms of aggressive cancer.

Little wonder then that when she and other board members were concerned about leaks from the board to the media that she handed control of the investigation to a semi-autonomous unit of security experts who quickly crossed the line into legal and ethically wrong areas.

Bianco’s central thesis is that Dunn was scapegoated by her fellow board members.

Tom Perkins, despite being one of the founders of legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, which has backed the likes of Google, Amazon and Electronic Arts, is portrayed as a thoroughly unlikeable man who micro- manages his investments and is not afraid to let personal grudges influence business decisions.

In contrast, Bianco paints Keyworth as an ineffectual character whose main contribution to the board seems to be his friendship with one of the eponymous founders of the company.

Hurd, who inherited the Spygate saga, also comes in for strong criticism.

As Bianco sees it, Hurd had to choose between letting Perkins get revenge on Dunn, who by the time of her own ousting had ovarian cancer, or admit his own role in the out-of-control leak investigation.

“This was a high-order test of moral character and Hurd flunked it big time, becoming the main instrument of Perkins’s revenge scheme,” he writes.

Earlier this summer, the HP board voted 6-4 in favour of releasing details of the sexual harassment claim against Hurd, according to an e-mail sent to the New York Times by Oracle founder and chief executive Larry Ellison, a personal friend of Hurd.

True to form, the straight- talking Ellison wrote: “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago,” before continuing that “publishing known false sexual harassment claims is not good corporate governance; it’s cowardly corporate political correctness.”

Although just three of HP’s 10 current directors – Larry Babbio, Bob Ryan and Lucille Salhany – feature significantly in the book, it still provides a timely insight into the inner workings of a board that struggles to live up to the legacy of its founders.

Although it doesn’t fully explain how HP ended up losing one of the most successful chief executives of the last decade, The Big Lie shines a light on the boardroom machinations that lead to bad decisions being made.

Anthony Bianco must have rubbed his hands in glee when he heard of Hurd’s resignation.