The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

HP and Apple demonstrate execs need to own up to their mistakes too

This has been an interesting fortnight with first Mark Papermaster being fired from Apple, then Mark Hurd being ejected from Hewlett-Packard after a strange sexual harassment investigation that uncovered violations of the HP rules of employee conduct.

Mark Papermaster was the head of the iPhone and iPod division at Apple and therefore the man responsible for a lot of shenanigans that transpired in the last few months (think "stolen iPhone prototype", for example, or "missing white iPhone 4") culminating in the PR disaster of so-called "antennagate", the media frenzy over antenna problems in the popular device.

As an aside, I have an iPhone 4 and don't have any particular problems with my antenna, but it does drop calls left and right, as all my previous iPhones have also done. The iPhone 4 is a great portable computer but a mediocre phone. At best.

Meanwhile, over at my former alma-mater Hewlett-Packard (I worked there for five years, then did consulting work with Walter Hewlett afterwards), the long-slow burn of executives continues. First it was Carly Fiorina, who I've written about more than once on this blog, and now it's Hurd, the guy who was brought in to "rescue" HP from the post-Fiorina doldrums. To be fair, Hurd has done a good job and HP's prospects are good, but he also continued the evolutionary change that Fiorina started, the dismantling of the mythic HP Way that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had always made a core value of the company.

I don't want to rehash it all this many years later, but will just say that it's a long time since HP had a consumer hit and that discarding the "Next Bench" philosophy (e.g., "build things you'd want to buy") might have not been such a bright move after all. Still, the company has good financials and is a significant player in the corporate space (though I'll cynically suggest that's due to the long, slow death of Sun Microsystems).

Hurd forgot that being CEO doesn't make you immune to the requirement for ethical behavior and when he realized the Board of Directors was going to find out about his dalliance with HP contractor Jodie Fisher (the NYT coyly says "Mr. Hurd, who is married, has settled the matter with Ms. Fisher for an undisclosed sum."), he knew he was in trouble. Instead of resigning, though, the HP Board of Directors had to give him the boot, which at this level translates into them telling him to resign.

When your boss has to apologize for your division's design flaws, it's never good.

I'm not alone in this interpretation of Hurd's mistakes. Alex Dobuzinskis at Reuters says almost the same thing about Fiorina and Hurd nailing closed the coffin of the HP Way in his piece "Fiorina, Hurd: No practitioners of the HP Way", and Ben Worthen at the Journal also writes about how "Hurd Neglected to Follow HP Way".

Curious about Mark Papermaster's story? The SF Chronicle reports that it was a cultural difference with Apple vs. Papermaster's previous employer, IBM: "At the end of the day, it might have been that he didn't have enough t-shirts and blue jeans in his closet", an angle echoed by MacRumors, but that's bogus. Almost always, "cultural differences" is a cover for unacceptable performance and I can't think of a worse example of corporate embarrassment than fabled Apple's iPhone 4 release.

What interests me about both of these situations is that in both cases the executives felt that they were immune to the consequences of their actions. Papermaster presumably watched the flame-out of the popular but flawed iPhone 4 as the media lambasted Apple for its shortcomings, secure that it wasn't his fault, really. Hurd was dating Fisher -- and putting their rendezvous on the corporate expense account -- without even a second thought too. Mark, you make millions of dollars, you couldn't spring for dinner at Il Fornaio or similar out of your own wallet?

I am glad both of these guys were fired, actually. Not for their careers, but because it reaffirms that all of us, whether a lowly assembly line worker or a senior executive, are responsible for our actions and need to make the smartest and most ethical decisions we can make, and that we have to live with the consequences of these actions. It's also not a surprise that both guys were fired rather than realizing their error and resigning.

Life gives us challenges. The test is how you deal with them.

Before you leave a comment, a tip: If you're interested in blogging, you should sign up for my Blogsmart News so you can stay up to date on the latest insider tips and ideas for your Internet business and marketing efforts. Sign up right now and you'll get a free copy of my "Insider's Guide to Blogging" ebook too!