Leo Apotheker's last memo to HP employees
Leo Apotheker may not be the CEO of Hewlett-Packard anymore — Meg Whitman took his place this morning — but the former chief executive didn't head out the door without sending one last memorandum to his employees.
Context & Ripple Effects
Leo Apotheker's exit closes an eleven-month arc that began with his appointment as CEO and president in September 2010 and ran through the strategy he laid out in March 2011 — a pivot toward enterprise software that commentators at the time, including a January BBC piece, openly doubted could make HP 'cool'. The summer then unraveled it: the TouchPad liquidation sale overwhelmed HP's own e-commerce site in August, and the board confirmed it was studying a spinoff of the personal computers unit.
The memo itself is a footnote to a board decision already made — Meg Whitman was named president and CEO this morning and sent her first company-wide email the same day, telling staff HP must focus on its mission. Syndication across Bloomberg, TechCrunch and others shows how widely the shakeup travelled, and commentary has been unsparing about a transition described internally as anything but seamless.
First-order effects
- HP employees receive two competing messages in one day — Apotheker's farewell memo and Whitman's first company-wide email — leaving the workforce with no settled narrative on day one of the new regime.
- Apotheker's March strategy, built around the enterprise software pivot, is now an orphaned agenda: its author is gone before any of its major moves were completed.
Second-order effects
- Whitman inherits the pending PC spinoff decision outright — the separation study announced in late August now lands on her desk, forcing her first strategic test to be whether to unwind or complete her predecessor's most controversial move.
- Investors and partners who priced HP against Apotheker's software-led roadmap must re-underwrite the company against Whitman's priorities, with the TouchPad fire sale and Palm acquisition ($1.2 billion in April 2010) standing as sunk costs of the abandoned direction.
Third-order effects
- Commentators have already reached back to Carly Fiorina's contentious 2002 Compaq fight to frame this shakeup, suggesting HP's structural problem is a board that keeps changing CEOs faster than strategies can mature — a governance pattern, not a personnel one.
- If the pattern holds, HP's identity will keep oscillating between consumer hardware and enterprise services with each leadership change, raising the question of whether only a formal split of the PC unit can end the cycle.
The trend: HP's leadership churn — three CEOs in roughly a decade by commentators' own accounting — is turning each executive transition into a wholesale strategic reversal rather than a course correction.