by Tom Taulli | October 26, 2011 10:37 am
It’s no mystery why CEOs make huge amounts of money. The good ones have unique skill sets, combining leadership, a strong sense of anticipating market trends and seemingly flawless execution. But they possess something else that’s often overlooked: good time management.
Only a few CEOs — like Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL[1]) former boss, Steve Jobs — have the mental bandwidth to micromanage a global operation. Things get even tougher when a company is experiencing big-time problems.
A prime example is Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ[2]). The company has terminated three CEOs in the past six years. It’s a veritable executive Bermuda Triangle.
The latest CEO to walk through the Hewlett-Packard turnstile is Meg Whitman. And she has a stellar background. She was critical in building eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY[3]) into a dot-com powerhouse. She also had executive positions at companies like Hasbro (NASDAQ:HAS[4]), FTD and Disney (NYSE:DIS[5]).
And Whitman’s compensation at HPQ? An annual salary of $1 — OK, and a big slug of options, too. She definitely believes in the upside.
But a troubling announcement came out this week: Whitman joined the board of a dot-com start-up company, Zaarly, that has created a marketplace that allows people to post offers — say, to have their house cleaned or find someone to teach them how to play the drums. It’s kind of like a next-generation craigslist.
Doesn’t Whitman have enough on her plate already as the head of a $50 billion market-cap company? Not to mention Whitman also serves on the boards of Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG[6]) and Zipcar (NASDAQ:ZIP[7]). Her time seems crunched as is.
Whitman needs to figure out how to stabilize Hewlett-Packard and repair the company’s loss of confidence with investors, as HPQ stock has lost about 40% of its value this year. She also needs to determine whether to keep or unload the company’s PC business, as well as come up with a software strategy that can deal with intense competition. HP recently spent $10 billion on Autonomy, which will be at the core of this segment.
It’s a lot of work, and Whitman definitely has a history of success. But if she continues to pile up the outside distractions, she might be setting Hewlett-Packard up for another leadership failure.
Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog “IPOPlaybook[8],” a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of “All About Short Selling”[9] and “All About Commodities.”[10] Follow him on Twitter at @ttaulli[11]. As of this writing, he did not own a position in any of the aforementioned stocks.
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