HP Needs to Stop Before It Can Grow

A response to Mark Vena's "HP Needs More Than a New CEO," and my second letter to HP's board.

24 Aug 2026 — 8 min read

Mark Vena's "HP Needs More Than a New CEO," published in TechNewsWorld, has been showing up in my LinkedIn comments and my DMs since it was released. Same question every time: What do you think?

Here's my answer. Where Vena's right, where the diagnosis breaks down, and a second letter to HP's board.

Where Vena Is Right

Vena, who's covered this industry for 25 years and runs SmartTech Research, gets more right than he's getting credit for. His numbers hold up. Revenue was up 9% in Q2, but PC and printing volume both fell, meaning pricing and mix are covering for a volume problem in both core businesses. AI PCs won't fix that; every competitor is telling its board the same story.

He's also right about culture, and not in passing: "Large hardware companies naturally want new initiatives to fit existing financial targets, sales channels, compensation systems, and management processes." I've written versions of that sentence myself. Vena's piece is worth reading in full for that section alone.

Where the Diagnosis Breaks Down

Where I disagree is the platform list: meeting intelligence, commercial wearables, ambient computing, and eventually robotics. Those could be the answer. They might not be. That's not a question I'm positioned to settle from the outside, and it's not the board's question either. It belongs to the next CEO, the leadership team they build, and the organization.

But whichever platform turns out to be right, there's a problem with how Vena gets there, and it shows up in his own words. His conclusion says HP's problem "is spreading investment across too many reasonable initiatives instead of committing enough resources to one capable of changing the company." Good advice.

Then his own piece does the opposite: four platforms, building toward what he calls a "unified platform."

He diagnoses the disease and then seems to prescribe more of it.

The Missing Piece Is Focus

What's missing is focus, and I mean something narrower than the word usually carries: the discipline to say no to almost everything and commit hard to one thing. HP has to build that discipline for itself. Vena laid out four platforms, but the answer doesn't have to be one of them. Whatever it turns out to be, picking something HP can own outright instead of just compete in is a call only HP can make. Right now, HP is one of many players in every market it serves.

Everyone's talking about what HP should add. Almost nobody is talking about what it has to stop making to afford that. HP's own store today lists 174 printer models, on top of a build-to-order system at HP Shopping that can spin up thousands of laptop and desktop configurations. Meg Whitman said last June that the combined HP and HP Enterprise she used to run once operated in 190 countries, 40 of which accounted for 85% of the revenue and 125% of the profit. The other 150 countries were dragging profits down. Nobody's run that math on HP Inc. today.

Stopping something means giving up revenue, or a customer, or a country, and nobody wants to be the one who signs off on that. This requires leadership courage.

Growth starts with stopping.

And HP's board needs to resist the urge to fall back on consultants to make that call, as they've done in the past. I've written about one such experience in more detail.

Mark and I, with our commentaries on HP, are Monday-morning quarterbacking. I've been outside HP for close to fifteen years now. While I still hear from many within HP and have some insights, any path forward has to come from inside: from the team that believes in what it can build.

That makes this a leadership problem before it's a strategy problem. Culture sets the guardrails. Vision drives the direction. The next CEO's first job is rebuilding enough trust that HP can find its own vision instead of adopting someone else's.

Who Should Fill This Job?

Vena describes the resume that the next CEO needs. He never asks what experience that person needs to survive inside HP. His version of the job: "a hardware-and-software platform builder with direct experience scaling subscription revenue." That's where he stops.

My February letter argued for someone who understands HP from the inside. Not necessarily someone currently employed, but an individual with significant tenure at HP, who deeply understands the company's culture, has internalized its operational philosophy, and could be recruited to return to HP. That describes trust, not a strategy. What they'd build once they have that trust is a separate question, and it's theirs to answer, not mine.

HP Has a Bench

Whether someone who actually fits that description exists is a fair question. I think the answer is yes. I don't know what HP's search committee has looked at, but after my February pieces ran, current and former HP people reached out with names: some still inside HP, some gone for years and building real experience elsewhere. That's a candidate pool worth taking seriously.

Four Outside Hires, Four Losses

There's a second reason to look inside first: the alternative has a track record, and it isn't good. HP has tried the pure outside hire four times, regardless of resume, and lost it four times. Carly Fiorina came from Lucent. Mark Hurd came from NCR. Léo Apotheker came from SAP. Meg Whitman came from eBay and a Senate campaign. They left for different reasons, and I won't flatten four different situations into one story. But none of them truly became part of the organization the way HP's next leader needs to. Each led HP from the front. None led from the inside, and none stayed long enough to convince the organization they were committed to its long-term success.

What's different now isn't about the resume. HP needs a leader who becomes part of the place, backed by a board willing to give them the time to prove it.

The Fork

That's the real choice facing the board right now, and it isn't platform versus no platform.

Option one: hire a leader who already has, or can quickly rebuild, real trust inside the organization. Not goodwill from the board, but credibility with HP's own people, enough that they'll follow this person into hard conversations about what to kill and where to focus. That trust isn't the leader's to build alone; the board earns its share by being visibly, durably committed to the person they hired. That leader may arrive without a finished strategy. That's fine. Trust and alignment are the first job. The vision comes after, and it comes from inside.

Option two: hire someone who arrives with the strategy already built: a platform thesis, a stack of acquisitions, a plan that looks complete on day one. Ask them to run it inside a culture they haven't earned the standing to change yet. HP has tried that four times with an outside CEO. Four times, the plan died in the gap between the strategy and the trust needed to carry it out.

External hires are 61% more likely to be fired. I think that's exactly why internal succession has become the default: 74% of S&P 500 CEO appointments are internal today.

While the option the board picks is critical, what it does after picking is nearly as important. HP doesn't need a CEO for two years, or four. This company has taken on entirely new businesses before and backed them for a decade or more when it mattered. This transformation needs that time, and it's unclear whether today's board has the patience for it.

A Second Letter to HP's Board

Dear HP board —

In February, my advice was on four things: an internal candidate with real technical credibility, a former HP executive back on the board, the CTO in the room without a vote, and a real commitment to rebuilding the culture, not a memo about one. Two of those still belong on this list exactly as they were. The internal-candidate ask has been sharpened by everything since; it's items 5 and 6 below, not a separate line. The culture commitment isn't a checklist item. It's the whole argument this piece is making, and it closes this letter instead of opening it.

This isn't a shrink-to-survive list. Growth starts with stopping, and this is the time to stop.

Still true from February:

Put a former HP executive back on the board. HP did this as a matter of course for decades. It's worth doing again: institutional memory in the room, someone who can and will push back when a decision drifts from what actually makes this company work.

Give the CTO a seat in the room, without a vote. Decisions about products, R&D, and where to place a decade-long bet need a direct line to HP's technical leadership, not a version that's been filtered through three other executives first.

New since Vena's piece:

Cut what doesn't earn its keep, and cut it hard. Not 5% across the board. Start with the product line complexity. Does HP need 174 different printer models and a build-to-order system that spins out thousands of PC and laptop configurations? The same test applies to geography: HP and HP Enterprise's top 40 countries once produced 85% of the revenue and 125% of the profit. These are just a few examples. Everything should be on the table.
Own one truly new thing, and fund it like you mean it. Not an extension of PCs or printing. AI features bolted onto existing products aren't differentiation; they're table stakes, and every competitor is running the same slide. Commit to something HP doesn't already do and could own outright, resulting in an innovation premium. It might be one of Vena's four platforms. It might be something none of us have named yet. Pick it, then fund it like a company that intends to win it, not one splitting its bet four ways.
Widen the CEO search past HP's current org chart. Some of the strongest candidates I've heard named since February left HP years ago and have since built real experience outside it. Go find them.
If you hire from outside anyway, ask about culture before strategy. Find out whether the candidate plans to lead from inside HP's culture, not from in front of it. That's the trait that's already beaten four outside hires. Ask that before you ask about their platform thesis.
Commit to seven to ten years, not two or four. HP has made decade- and multi-decade commitments before, when it moved into entirely new businesses and built something it intended to own. Seven to ten years is what this transformation will take. Stop scoring the next CEO on the quarterly cadence you'd use for a printer refresh. Give whatever new bet emerges its own funding and its own metrics, build in the patience to defend a bad quarter instead of flinching at it, and accept that you, as a board, will be judged on whether you held that line when it got hard.

That's the list.

As an outsider, I can't hand HP the playbook, and Vena can't either. The next CEO earns it by rebuilding enough trust for HP to decide what to build and what to let go of first. Here's the sequence I would recommend: first, determine what needs to stop ; then establish trust; and finally, pursue a vision that emerges from these foundations, supported by a patient board, which will allow HP to discover its own path. Get it backward, and you'll be reading CEO number eight's exit interview in about eighteen months, wondering why the plan never survived contact with the building.

End Notes/Sources

This piece responds directly to Mark Vena's reporting and analysis. Full credit to him and to TechNewsWorld: "HP Needs More Than a New CEO," by Mark N. Vena, TechNewsWorld, August 4, 2026.

The Meg Whitman country-footprint figures are from "Opening offices in 120 countries is 'not a badge of honor'—pick 30 instead, says iconic former tech CEO Meg Whitman," Fortune, June 9, 2026.

From my own archive on this same pattern: