I am surprised that the nytimes would run such an obvious hatchet job of an article. I am not saying that they are always honest and truthful and fair, but at least they used to be smart and skilful enough to make their hatchet jobs not that obvious.
I'm a little confused. So on the new CEO's watch while at SAP, SAP stole Oracle's IP, for which Oracle is suing SAP for $2 billion. The same board that fired Hurd for some non-sexual hanky panky is ok with hiring a thief? Or the boss of thieves?
How is this a hatchet job?
Don't get me wrong, I have no love for Oracle, at best I'm neutral on them. I'd never want to work there. But at least it is a fairly well run business.
HP, on the other hand, seems to have one of the worst boards in the history of the valley. I just don't see what they are doing as making any sort of sense at all. Pick a thief over someone like VJ who has long time insider cred, well liked by the rank and file, well respected in and out of the company, nah, let's pass on that, we need a crook. Seriously, how can anyone justify choices like this?
Sorry for another rant on this topic, but HP used to be a hugely admired company, it would be nice if it returned to that, but instead it seems to be determined to do one wrong thing after another. Starts at the top and the top is the board.
I am not going to give you a detailed answer, because I do not have time to defend multi-millionaires, they can defend themselves. So I will just give you one sentence of the article:
"Over the long term, though, it hoped that TomorrowNow would act as a kind of stalking horse, allowing SAP to persuade its new customers to abandon Oracle entirely and switch to SAP’s expensive suite of software applications."
If you don't think that was written by an Oracle shill, then you really need to improve your reading comprehension or are an Oracle shill yourself.
As best I can tell, you are reading that article in such a way so as to believe it was heavily slanted in favor of Oracle and you cherry picked one sentence you believe makes your point.
Shrug. I don't really care if the article was pro Oracle or pro HP or pro you. Wasn't my point, and still isn't.
The point I raised was that hiring a CEO that was involved in that mess shows really poor judgement on the part of the HP board, they had internal candidates that were far better choices IMO, and they do this. Another bad decision.
My point was all about the HP board.
And in rereading the article, I suspect that the author shares my point of view. It's not that it is a pro-Oracle point of view, it's a con-HP board point of view. I don't care about Oracle, I grudgingly respect that they wring every dime of profit they can out of whatever they do but I've had friends work there and from what I can tell it's a pretty crummy place to work. I do care about HP. I still have friends who work there and it used to be a fantastic place to work. I was hoping that getting rid of Hurd would be a step towards returning to the HP way and couldn't be more disappointed in what the HP board did.
Not to say it occurred in the article, but you can do a pretty fair hatchet job without once uttering an untruth. It just takes careful phrasing, selected emphasis, and selective editing of what information is provided.
I've heard it used by strategy consultants to mean someone who is well rounded and performs well in many roles/disciplines, instead of someone with a narrow focus/expertise.
Other than the general use of sports metaphors in business, I can't think of a special meaning for 'athlete' during exec-recruiting.
I suspect Ray Lane was simply analogizing to a league draft, or choosing players before a pick-up game. Perhaps, he was even primed to think that way by the phrasing of an earlier question. ("Oracle would say they've already signed your star player. Was that a factor in choosing Apotheker, setting up a grudge match with Oracle?")
