A note to Meg Whitman

As a board member you do bear responsibility for the current debacle at HP. 

Over the last decade, the selection of CEO and board members at HP has left a lot to be desired. Each of the last 3 CEOs have besmirched the HP brand making fundamental business or ethical blunders. Don’t become another name on that list.

You do not have much time to turn the HP ship around.

As long as the stock price remains so depressed, HP will be a target of take over.  It wont  be by a friendly party. Rumors or speculation that Oracle may make a play will give rise to others. The others may be from overseas.

Here is an unsolicited tactical plan for you which will give you some breathing room to find the “HP way”.

1. It will be less costly for you in the long run to walk away from the Autonomy acquisition than to wring out ROI from this outlandish purchase. The cost of walking away is far less than the years and organizational energies required to integrate Autonomy. Aurasma may be a neat a product but a company that does not have a tablet or smart phone will find it difficult to extract revenues from it…
2. Write off the Palm purchase and embrace Android. Re-enter the tablet market using Andoid while pushing your development team to create some new functionality which will make people re-consider your tablet.
3. Re-state your commitment to the PC and hardware platform – so that the core of HP remains intact.
4. Cut cost and price on both laptops and printers to be a good source of income this Christmas season and be able to end the year on a positive note.
5. Aggressively focus the sales force to sell services to the major corporate organizations – specifically, address the healthcare vertical.

Remember Lou Gerstner’s admonition when he took over IBM. You do not need to spend time developing a strategy. You need to get your team and the organization to execute and deliver results.

If you can stabilize the stock price over the next few months, and re-focus the organization on the ‘HP way’, you will have gained the time to build a vision and long term strategy for HP while also building a ‘can do’ culture.