By the late $1990$s$,$ with founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard long gone, HP had more than $100,000$ employees and $$31$ billion in revenues. While the product market competition intensified, HP also experienced a series of corporate governance intrigues that involved boardroom coups, corporate spying scandals, and rapid$-$fire CEO turnover. In short, it seemed to have lost its way.

In $1999,$ Carly Fiorina was brought in as the first female CEO of a Dow Jones $30$ company. She spearheaded the controversial $$25$ billion acquisition of Compaq in $2002.$ In $2005,$ she was fired after HP lost half of its value. For her trouble, Fiorina was paid $$20$ million to leave. Patricia Dunn, chair of the board, was frustrated by unauthorized leaks from the board when the decision to fire Fiorina was deliberated. Dunn hired a private security firm to illegally spy on board members and journalists, and she herself was then fired in $2006.$

The board hired Mark Hurd to be its next CEO in $2006.$first IT company to have sales of more than $$100$ billion. Hurd did all this while squeezing costs. Even though Hurd seemed to have restored HP to its former glory, he suddenly resigned in August $2010$ amid stories of sexual harassment and iffy expense reports. He left HP with a severance packet of $$12$ million and joined Oracle$$one of HP$$s archrivals$$as co$-$CEO. Oracle$$s founder and CEO Larry Ellison called the HP board$$s decision to let its star CEO go $$the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.$$

In November $2010,$ HP$$s board hired L$$o Apotheker as the new CEO, but quickly fired him in September $2011$ after HP lost $$30$ billion in market capitalization. For Apotheker$$s less than $11$ months of hard work, he walked away with $$13$ million: severance payment of $$7\mathrm{.}2$ million, HP shares worth $$3\mathrm{.}4$ million, and a performance bonus of $$2\mathrm{.}4$ million.

In September $2011,$ Meg Whitman, an HP board member and eBay$$s former CEO, was named HP$$s newest CEO$$the fourth CEO since $2005$ and the seventh since $1999($there were several interim CEOs between $$permanent$$ CEO appointments$).$ At this point, turmoil at the top$$in combination with the challenging competitive landscape in which PC sales were not growing and demand for printing was reduced$$contributed to what Bloomberg Businessweek reported was a $$free fall.$$ In August $2010,$ HP was worth $$100$ billion. In January $2013,$ it was worth only $$29$ billion$$less than Carnival Cruise Lines, which had one$-$ninth of the revenue. While HP continued to sell and profit from PCs and printers, where it was the worldwide market leader, the disarray at the top was viewed as $$one of the great corporate destructions of all time,$$ noted an expert. Could Whitman stop the free fall?

STOPPING THE FREE FALL

Whitman did stop the free fall and restore stability. She had successfully initiated and implemented a five$-$year turnaround plan. But whatever HP once had been, it was no longer. Its new innovations were more incremental as opposed to radical. Its cost cutting was painful, and Whitman laid off $85,000$ employees from a total headcount of $300,000$ when she took over.

$$Very few people have run a $$110$ billion company,$$ Whitman commented in a Harvard Business Review interview. $$Everything has more zeros attached to it$,$ more complexity, more countries, more tax jurisdictions.$$ Because HP became such a sprawling technology conglomerate, its shares were trading at a conglomerate discount. To unlock value for shareholders, in $2016$ Whitman engineered a split of HP into two new $$50-$billion$-$plus publicly traded companies, each with a narrower set of businesses.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise $($HPE$$dropping the hyphen between Hewlett and Packard in the name of the original entity$)$: the data center, cloud, and consulting company, with revenues of $$58$ billion and an operating profit of $$6$ billion in $2015.$

HP Inc.: the PC and printer company, with revenues of $$57$ billion and an operating profit of $$6$ billion in $2015.$

Each became more focused and easier for shareholders to value and appreciate. When the decision was announced, the stock of HP $($the original company$)$ went up$.$ However, to minimize board room intrigue, Whitman did not tell board members which child company they were going to until about a month and a half before the event. The move was viewed by Bloomberg Businessweek $($and many other commentators$)$ as $$a sign of defeat,$$ admitting HP$$s inability to slow the commoditization of its PC and printer businesses.

A TALE OF TWO HP COMPANIES

Of the two new child companies, HPE, packed with technologies of the future, was sexier and seemed to have more momentum to grow. Whitman kept it for herself as CEO. HP Inc. had a bunch of commoditized businesses that were believed to have a low probability of growth and every likelihood of slow decline. PC sales were not growing, and demand for printing hard copies was lower than before Whitman named herself chair of the board for HP Inc. and a