HP Has Fired, Forced Out, or Lost 6 CEOs in 25 Years. Here We Go Again.
Two CEO successions hit on the same day. Disney chose a 28-year insider. HP's board is starting from scratch — again.
This morning, Enrique Lores announced he's stepping down as CEO of HP to take the top job at PayPal. Bruce Broussard, a board member since 2021, steps in as interim CEO while the board launches a search for a permanent successor.
His farewell letter is titled "Hasta Siempre, HP" — "forever yours." And knowing Enrique, he means it.
A Peer, Not a Stranger
Enrique and I were peers during some of HP's toughest years — the Mark Hurd and Léo Apotheker era. If you weren't there, it's hard to convey what that period felt like from the inside. Early morning Thursday Halo calls for global status updates. Customer care crises. New product launches where the stakes felt existential. The constant tension between Wall Street's quarterly demands and the long-term innovation work that actually keeps a technology company alive.
Enrique and I spent a fair amount of time together through all of it. He was an engineer who'd walked in as an intern thirty-six years ago and worked his way through the business — DesignJet product manager, Indigo acquisition, running Large Format out of Barcelona, heading the commercial PC organization, managing print across EMEA. He didn't study HP's culture in an onboarding binder. He absorbed it over decades.
I always reminded Enrique that I had never sold a single share of my HP stock as long as he was at the helm. And I'd tell him — don't screw it up.
He didn't. He pushed HP into digital services, subscription models, industrial print, 3D, and AI-enabled personal systems. He navigated a brutal hardware market. You can debate execution on any given quarter, but the strategic direction was sound, and it came from someone who deeply understood what HP was and what it could become.
So thank you, Enrique. You did something rare: you led the company you loved. I wish you well at PayPal.
Now comes the hard part.
Phil McKinney
HP's Board Has a History of Getting This Wrong
HP's board has a track record of getting CEO succession catastrophically wrong. And I don't say that as an outsider. I spent years as HP's CTO. I watched the culture up close. I saw what made HP extraordinary — and what happened when leadership didn't understand it.
After Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard stepped back, John Young and Lew Platt led the company capably. They were insiders who understood the DNA. But even Bill and Dave didn't get succession perfect. They never built a formal leadership development pipeline — no structured process for identifying, grooming, and preparing the next generation of CEOs from within. And when performance waned in the late 1980s, both founders had to come back — personally visiting product divisions, talking directly to staff about the company's challenges. Dave was deeply involved in selecting Young's replacement in 1992, personally endorsing Lew Platt for the role.
Lew was the real thing. I met him a number of times as an HP customer when I was an SVP at Teligent. He was one of the reasons I agreed to come to HP after my Teligent days. If everyone at HP was like Lew, that was an organization I wanted to be part of. And Lew delivered — he grew HP's revenue from $16 billion to $47 billion during his tenure.
But the board pushed him aside anyway.
Why? Because by the late 1990s, HP was missing Wall Street earnings estimates. Critics felt Platt had been slow to the internet revolution while Sun Microsystems and IBM moved more aggressively. The company's consensus-driven culture — the very thing that made HP special — was increasingly seen by the board as a liability. More than 80 stand-alone divisions. Slow decision-making. Not enough "agility" for Wall Street's taste.
So the board went looking for a "rock star." An outsider with a bold vision who could shake things up. And that's where the wheels came off.
This is the part that doesn't get talked about enough: getting the culture wasn't just a failure of executive leadership at HP — it was a failure of the board itself. The board never truly grasped or valued the HP Way. While there were former HP executives on the board over the years — Ann Livermore, Dick Hackborn — the board as a whole was perpetually sucked into Wall Street's quarterly fixation, unwilling to make the hard long-term investment calls that a company like HP requires.
Carly Fiorina came from Lucent. She'd never run a business — she'd run a sales organization. She pushed through the Compaq merger against fierce internal opposition, including from Bill Hewlett's own son. HP's stock dropped 50% during her tenure. She fundamentally didn't understand the HP Way. The board fired her and paid her over $20 million to leave.
Mark Hurd came from NCR. Brilliant operator. Wall Street loved him. He doubled the stock price through aggressive cost-cutting. But those cuts hollowed out R&D and gutted the innovation pipeline. Then he was forced out over an ethics violation. The cost-cutting CEO who didn't invest in the future never understood that HP's real asset wasn't on the balance sheet.
Léo Apotheker lasted eleven months. He came from SAP and tried to turn a hardware company into a software company overnight. He announced HP might exit the PC business entirely. The board panicked and fired him.
Then Meg Whitman. Here's the part people forget: Meg was already on HP's board. She was part of the board that hired Léo Apotheker. She helped create the very disaster she was then asked to clean up. And while she stabilized the company and managed the split into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, she never spent real time inside HP's operations — never walked the halls long enough to understand the culture or the people who made it work. She was the fourth outside CEO in twelve years. By that point, the culture that Bill and Dave built had been beaten down so many times it was barely recognizable.
See the pattern? Every outside hire — Carly, Mark, Léo, Meg — failed to understand or embrace what makes HP unique. They brought operational playbooks from other industries and tried to impose them on an organization that was fundamentally different from anything they'd experienced.
Why the Best CEOs Leave
But HP's succession failures aren't just about hiring the wrong people. They're about driving the right people out.
After Meg Whitman managed the split, Dion Weisler took over HP Inc. in 2015. He was an insider — a decade at HP, deep operational knowledge. Then in 2019, he stepped down, citing "family health matters." I have no reason to doubt that family was a factor. But anyone who has spent time in the C-suite knows that "family" and "personal reasons" are often code. They're the socially acceptable exit when the real story involves a board that sets the wrong priorities — Wall Street's quarterly numbers and nothing else. When a CEO with long-term vision is handcuffed to a 90-day scoreboard, "family" starts looking like the dignified way out.
This isn't just an HP story. It's an epidemic.
According to FCLTGlobal research conducted with McKinsey, 47% of corporate executives report that their own boards are an unexpected source of short-term pressure — actively impeding long-term strategic thinking. Meanwhile, 87% of executives say they feel the most pressure to demonstrate financial results within two years. In conversations with more than 100 CEOs, FCLTGlobal found that executives consistently describe the constant demand to meet 90-day earnings targets as a "straitjacket" — one that prevents them from executing sustainable, long-term strategies. Some told researchers they were contemplating taking their companies private just to escape quarterly capitalism.
That's not theoretical. Michael Dell spent $25 billion to do exactly that — buying back Dell Technologies in 2013 to escape Wall Street's quarterly scrutiny. While private, Dell invested $21 billion in R&D, transformed the company from a declining PC manufacturer into an enterprise technology leader, and returned to public markets in 2018 at a value that has since climbed past $90 billion. Dell didn't buy a company. He bought freedom from a board beholden to 90-day cycles.
Russell Reynolds Associates is now tracking what they call "premature succession" — a growing trend of CEOs voluntarily making unplanned departures because, as one researcher put it, "the conditions for their success are compromised." The problem isn't the leaders. It's the environment boards create around them.
I wrote about this last year in my response to the Wall Street Journal's defense of quarterly reporting. The WSJ argued that quarterly reporting doesn't hinder long-term investment. They're wrong. I lived it in HP's boardrooms — watching billion-dollar innovation projects get paused or killed not because they lacked value, but because earnings calls were weeks away. The current system trains an entire ecosystem — boards, analysts, compensation committees — to think in 90-day cycles. And it's the best CEOs, the ones with real long-term vision, who get squeezed hardest.
Now Enrique is leaving too. He says it's for the opportunity at PayPal. I take him at his word. But six CEOs in twenty-five years is not bad luck. It's a system that chews through leaders.
What the Board Needs to Understand
HP is not a normal company. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built something that transcended typical corporate culture. The HP Way wasn't a poster on the wall. It was a set of deeply held beliefs about trust, access, respect for the individual, and the conviction that innovation comes from giving brilliant people the freedom and support to do extraordinary work.
When I was CTO, Art Fong — HP employee number nine — spent Saturday afternoons teaching me what those values actually meant in practice. Bill Hewlett cutting the padlock off the tool room because someone had tried to restrict access. Dave Packard staying until midnight to serve as Art's lab tech when a deadline loomed. Bill and Dave personally buying Art a house when discrimination prevented the sale. That wasn't policy. That was who they were. And it created an innovation engine that lasted decades.
The CEOs who thrived at HP — John Young, Lew Platt, Enrique Lores — were people who grew up inside that system. They didn't need the culture explained to them. They'd lived it.
The data backs this up. According to research from Wharton professor Matthew Bidwell, external hires receive significantly lower performance evaluations for their first two years compared to internal promotions — and they're 61% more likely to be fired. Harvard Business Review has reported that two out of five new CEOs fail within their first 18 months. In the S&P 500, boards increasingly know this: 74% of new CEOs in 2023 were promoted from within. The failure rate climbs even higher when the outsider comes from a different industry. And yet boards keep falling for the same trap — they see a "proven leader" from a different context and assume leadership is transferable. They confuse operational competence with cultural fluency. They mistake confidence for understanding.
Here's what's remarkable about today: two massive succession stories broke simultaneously. Right alongside HP's announcement, Disney named Josh D'Amaro as Bob Iger's successor. D'Amaro is a 28-year Disney veteran. He joined in 1998 and worked his way up through parks, resorts, and experiences. He's the architect of the largest global expansion in Disney Experiences history.
People I know inside the Disney organization are thrilled — not because of his resume, but because he "gets what it means to be Disney."
That phrase should haunt HP's board.
Disney learned this lesson the hard way. The last time Iger stepped away, the board elevated Bob Chapek — technically an insider, but one whose vision clashed with the creative DNA of the company. Within two years, the board ousted him and brought Iger back. This time, they reportedly evaluated over 100 candidates, ran a multi-year process, and landed on someone whose instinct for the brand runs deep. They also created a new President and Chief Creative Officer role for Dana Walden, ensuring the other top internal candidate stays and the creative engine has dedicated leadership.
That's what intentional succession looks like.
What Makes HP, HP?
That's the one question HP's board needs its next CEO to answer.
Not someone who'll study it in an onboarding binder. Not someone who'll nod along to a presentation about the HP Way and then run the company like every other tech firm. Someone who already knows — in their bones — what this company is supposed to feel like when it's working.
That means the board should be looking hard at internal candidates. People who've spent years inside HP, who've absorbed the culture through osmosis, who understand why the company exists beyond the quarterly earnings call. And if they must go outside, they need someone who has demonstrated — not just claimed — a deep commitment to building and protecting innovation culture.
HP's revenue was roughly $58.8 billion when Enrique took over. It's lower now despite years of restructuring. The AI transition is accelerating. The PC market remains soft. There are real strategic challenges ahead.
But the biggest risk isn't strategic. It's cultural. Get the culture wrong and no strategy survives.
So, am I going to sell my shares?
I'm waiting to see if the HP Board gets it right.
Hasta siempre, Enrique.
Phil McKinney
Sources
FCLTGlobal and McKinsey & Company, "Rising to the Challenge of Short-Termism," September 2016. Survey of over 1,000 C-suite executives and board members on short-term pressures. fcltglobal.org
FCLTGlobal, "The Long-Term Habits of a Highly Effective Corporate Board," 2019. Research on board governance and short-term pressure, including the finding that 47% of executives report boards as an unexpected source of short-term pressure. fcltglobal.org
Matthew Bidwell, "Paying More to Get Less: The Effects of External Hiring versus Internal Mobility," Administrative Science Quarterly, 2011. Wharton research on external hire performance, exit rates, and compensation premiums. Knowledge at Wharton
Ram Charan, "Ending the CEO Succession Crisis," Harvard Business Review, February 2005. Research on CEO failure rates within the first 18 months. hbr.org
Spencer Stuart, "CEO Transitions 2023." Annual analysis of S&P 500 and S&P 1500 CEO succession patterns, including the 74% internal appointment rate for S&P 500 companies in 2023. Hunt Scanlon Media summary
Russell Reynolds Associates, "Looking Beyond the CEO," from The Next CEO report series, 2024. Research on "premature succession" and the trend of voluntary CEO departures. russellreynolds.com
Corporate Board Member, "Understanding the Rise in CEO Exits," 2025. Industry analysis of voluntary and involuntary CEO departure trends, including Russell Reynolds commentary on premature succession. boardmember.com
