An Open Letter to HP's Board, and Every Board Governing an Innovation-Dependent Organization
What innovation-dependent organizations need from their boards, and four places to start.
My previous post on HP's leadership transition struck a nerve. HP retirees, current employees, and leaders at organizations with no connection to HP reached out, not to pile on, but because they recognized the same structural challenge in their own boardrooms. That told me the problem isn't unique to HP, and it isn't about individual directors. It's systemic.
Let me say something that might surprise people, given the critique that follows: board service is genuinely hard. I've sat on public, private, non-profit, and advisory boards. What looks glamorous from the outside is demanding work: the time commitment, the fiduciary responsibility, the decisions made with incomplete information under real pressure.
PwC's 2024 Annual Corporate Directors Survey found that more than half of directors acknowledge difficulty even expressing their views during board assessments. Only 28% of C-suite executives believe their boards have the right combination of skills and experience. These aren't signs of negligence. They're signs of a system under strain, where the complexity of oversight has outpaced the structures designed to support it.
The challenge I want to address is specific: What happens when the people responsible for stewarding an innovation-dependent organization have never actually lived inside an innovation culture? Not from malice. From a gap, the kind of gap that looks like competence, because the person has been successful everywhere else.
This piece is my attempt to bridge that gap. Not to point fingers, but to offer what I've learned from thirty years where my primary responsibility has been innovation, including a decade as CTO at HP and now more than a decade as CEO of an innovation-dependent organization. I've watched what happens when boards get this right and when they get it wrong.
Four Recommendations for HP's Board
I want to start with the practical advice, because I know board members are busy and the transition is underway.
1. Prioritize an internal candidate with technical credibility and cultural depth.
HP's next CEO should be someone who has been with the company for at least a decade, long enough to have absorbed the culture, not just studied it. Optimally, this person has established technical credibility: the engineers and product teams know them, respect them, and believe they understand what HP builds and why it matters.
The data supports this. Spencer Stuart reports that 74% of S&P 500 CEO appointments are now internal promotions. Wharton research shows external hires are 61% more likely to be fired, and the failure rate climbs further when outsiders come from different industries.
Disney learned this the hard way. Bob Chapek was a 26-year Disney veteran who ran the parks business brilliantly, but as CEO, he couldn't connect with the creative community that is Disney's cultural core. He alienated top creative executives, centralized decisions away from the people who understood the content, and was removed after less than three years. When the board selected Josh D'Amaro, a 28-year insider, they also elevated Dana Walden to the newly created role of President and Chief Creative Officer, reporting directly to the CEO. The principle was clear: leadership must have a direct, structural connection to the cultural DNA that defines the company. I'll come back to how HP should apply that principle and take it a step further in recommendation three.
The board should not be afraid to look beyond the EVP level. Some of the most compelling leaders in any organization are one or two levels below the C-suite: breakout leaders with the technical depth, cultural fluency, and runway to commit for fifteen or even twenty years.
HP's average CEO tenure over the last twenty-five years is just over four years. The industry average for public company CEOs is closer to seven. Neither is long enough for what HP needs. The next CEO shouldn't be a bridge. They should be a long bet, someone the organization can invest in and rally behind for a generation of leadership, not another cycle. And the board should align compensation to match that commitment: reward five-year total shareholder return, innovation pipeline health, and succession bench strength rather than quarterly EPS. Make long-term leadership a rewarded behavior, not a career risk.
One more consideration: the board should think carefully about whether HP needs a "fixer" or a "grower." Fixers restructure, cut costs, optimize operations. Growers invest, build, and take calculated risks on the future. A fixer CEO will almost certainly damage an innovation culture, because the instincts that make them good at fixing (eliminating waste, demanding quick ROI) are antithetical to the patience innovation requires. The board has to understand that trade-off before making the hire, not after.
Since publishing my earlier pieces, HP insiders and retirees have reached out to identify specific people within HP who could lead the company. The bench isn't empty. But the right insider isn't just about tenure. It's whether they carry the culture in how they lead, not just in the number of years on their badge.
2. Add a board member who is a former HP leader/executive, someone who can be the voice of the culture.
HP has historically had former leaders on its board. Ann Livermore and Dick Hackborn both served in this capacity, providing institutional memory and cultural continuity. Since the HP/HPE split, that practice has lapsed for HP. It's a missed opportunity.
This isn't about sentimentality or honoring the past. It's about structural competence. When strategic decisions arise (acquisitions, restructurings, shifts in R&D investment), a director who lived inside HP's innovation culture can distinguish between decisions that build on the organization's strengths and decisions that inadvertently destroy them. Their presence lends organizational credibility to board decisions and ensures those decisions pass through a filter of cultural fit before they reach the global team. When employees see that someone they recognize and respect has a seat at the table, alignment comes faster and runs deeper. That voice doesn't replace financial expertise or operational experience. It complements them in a way no outside director can.
The right person would be a former leader whom current and former employees recognize and respect, someone with the credibility to represent the culture authentically and the willingness to advocate for it. Not a quiet presence who adds legitimacy to the roster. An active voice who speaks truth in the boardroom and pushes back when decisions threaten the cultural foundation on which the organization depends.
3. Add the CTO to the board as an ex-officio, non-voting member.
This gives the board a direct, ongoing window into HP's technology community: the engineers, scientists, and researchers (the "TCP community" in HP's language) who build the products the company's future depends on. As ex-officio, the CTO participates in discussions and executive sessions but does not vote and does not count toward quorum. It's a voice, not a power shift.
Disney's recent experience is instructive here, though my recommendation goes further. When Disney's board recognized that the Chapek era had severed leadership's connection to the company's creative DNA, they created a new executive role, President and Chief Creative Officer, to ensure that connection could never be lost again. That was the right instinct: build a structural safeguard, not just pick a better leader. But Disney's fix addressed the connection between the CEO and the creative community. At HP, the disconnect runs deeper. It's between the board itself and the technical community. HP's technical community is to HP what Disney's creative community is to Disney: the source of everything that makes the company distinctive. The CTO ex-officio seat creates a structural connection between the boardroom and the technical teams across the organization, ensuring the board hears directly from the people closest to the technology, not just through the filter of management presentations.
I adjusted my own board governance to include the CTO as ex-officio and have directly seen the benefit. Board discussions about technology investments and R&D priorities are fundamentally better when someone in the room can speak with firsthand authority about what's technically possible, what the engineering teams are seeing, and where the real opportunities and risks live. Without that voice, the board is governing the technology agenda through secondhand reports and slide decks.
HP is a technology company. The board's ability to make sound strategic decisions depends on understanding the technology landscape, not in the abstract, but as the people building it experience it. This assumes the CTO has that deep connection to HP's engineering and research community. If the CTO role has become primarily administrative, the value of this recommendation diminishes, which is itself a signal worth paying attention to.
4. Commit to rebuilding and embracing a culture of innovation.
This is the hardest recommendation because it can't be implemented with a vote or a governance change. But it's the one that matters most.
Innovation isn't a department. It isn't a line item. It isn't something you can bolt onto a business optimized for quarterly performance and expect it to flourish. Innovation is an ecosystem of interdependent conditions: leadership engagement, trust-based culture, committed resources, patience, process that fits the organization, a compelling goal, and the ability to execute on both innovation and operations simultaneously. I codified these as The 7 Immutable Laws of Innovation while I was still CTO at HP. Fast Company picked them up immediately, and their headline asked the quiet part out loud: Do they apply to HP? Violate any one of these conditions, and the whole system collapses. A board's most important job at an innovation-dependent company is to ensure these conditions exist and are protected, especially when short-term pressures push management to compromise them.
And here's the proof that this is possible: HP has done it before. The innovation culture that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built was real. It was grounded in trust, integrity, leaders who did the work alongside their teams, and a generational commitment to the people and ideas that made HP extraordinary. That culture was lost during the Carly Fiorina era. We rebuilt it. Art Fong, HP employee #9, spent Saturday afternoons teaching me the attributes that made HP's innovation engine work, and we brought those lessons back across all of HP. Fast Company named HP one of the world's Most Innovative Companies three years running: 2008, 2009, 2010. First time in the company's history. Then the culture was lost again.
Lost, rebuilt, lost. That pattern is painful, but it contains a crucial truth: the DNA still exists, and it can be recovered. The proof is in the rebuilding itself. If the right conditions brought HP's innovation culture back once, they can bring it back again. That's what makes this moment an opportunity, not just another transition.
The Structural Challenge
Every director brings mental models from their career. That's valuable; it's why they're on the board. But those models can become dangerous when they don't match the organization being governed. If a director's instinct when revenue dips is to cut R&D, that instinct was trained in an environment where R&D isn't the lifeblood of the business. At a company like HP, cutting R&D during a downturn is like a university eliminating its faculty to balance the budget. The short-term math works. The institution ceases to be what it was.
This isn't about bad directors. It's about a system that places accomplished people in positions where their experience can actively mislead them, and where the role's complexity makes it genuinely difficult to know when that's happening. Research consistently shows that board composition directly correlates with how effectively a company innovates, but it's not just who's on the board; it's how they behave. And behavior is shaped by the mental models directors bring from their own careers.
The hardest thing for an accomplished person to say is: "My experience may not apply here." But that's exactly what innovation governance requires. And the most practical way to close that gap is structural, which is why the four recommendations above focus on changing who's in the room, what voices the board hears, and what the organization prioritizes.
The Opportunity
HP's heritage is extraordinary. The company Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built was once the most admired innovator in American business. That DNA hasn't disappeared. It's been suppressed by decades of leadership and governance that didn't understand or value it. The employees who still carry that culture forward are waiting for leadership that shares their belief in what HP can be.
A thirty-two-year HP veteran, responding to last week's post, put it better than I can: "Strategy can be copied. When the market turns, culture is what holds a company together. And no strategy survives if the culture is wrong. So the Board's question is simple: who truly understands what it means to be HP?"
I've seen what this company looks like when the conditions are right. I was there when Art Fong taught a room of young engineers what HP's innovation culture actually was. I was there when Fast Company recognized what we rebuilt. And I know the people still inside HP who carry that same belief.
This board has the opportunity to get it right, not just for HP, but as a model for every board governing an innovation-dependent organization. The four steps above are where I'd start. And I'm hopeful, genuinely hopeful, that this time will be different.
Phil McKinney is the former CTO of Hewlett-Packard, CEO of CableLabs, and author of Beyond the Obvious. He writes about innovation leadership and decision-making at philmckinney.com.
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