By Timothy Prickett Morgan
The longer that board members at Hewlett-Packard Co and its hired headhunters wait to fill that CEO slot that Lew Platt wants to make vacant so he can go fishing, the more choices they seem to have among Compaq Computer’s top executives. Prime candidates from Compaq are John Rando, recently head of Compaq’s services division, and John Rose, recently head of Compaq’s Enterprise Computing group and formerly head of PC units at both Compaq and Digital. Depending on how HP wants to position itself, it could choose either executive, and depending on their proclivities to work together again, HP may decide to choose both of them to help run the new HP minus its test and measurement businesses.
Regardless of what you read in the trade press, HP is not anywhere close to choosing a new CEO. At a briefing of Wall Street analysts last week, HP said that it would announce a new CEO in the December timeframe, and tried to dispel the notion that an announcement was impending. Nonetheless, Michael Fournell, just appointed the head of PR of HP’s test and measurement business, was quoted in Cnet.com as saying he expected HP to make its CEO announcement by early July. Ann Livermore, who is the top candidate within HP to become CEO and the head of its e-business and corporate computing efforts, is at 40 young enough to work alongside an older CEO brought in from the outside, such as John Rose formerly of Compaq and Digital, who is 53. A triumvirate with Rose as CEO, Livermore as president (retaining control of enterprise computing) and John Rando, who is 47, as general manager of services and e-business initiatives at HP looks like a pretty good option. By doing it this way, HP would get two potential future CEOs as well as a seasoned and lively executive for the top spot.
