“Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!” tweeted Eric Schmidt as Google announced he would move up to Executive Chairman.
Lost in that bombshell was a move by Ray Lane, the incoming Non-Executive Chairman at HP to add some exceptional talent to its board. Gary Reiner, former GE CIO, is one of the most innovative CIOs the industry has seen. Meg Whitman takes credit for eBay’s growth and was ready to take on an even bigger challenge – running the State of California. Shumeet Banerji, CEO of the consulting firm Booz and Dominique Senequier, CEO of AXA Private Equity bring substantive international breadth. Patricia Russo brings deep telecom industry expertise (and during her tenure as CEO at Alactel-Lucent oversaw an impressive data center consolidation project – some thing HP has been pitching to many of its customers).
The rumor mill calls it the post-Hurd purge. That the HP board was due – again - for a cleanup. May well be true. It’s impressive to see the quality of talent this cleanup is sweeping in.
