silicon valley

Bits Blog: Where Are the Women Executives in Silicon Valley?

December 9, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Though it won’t be news to anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley, a new study confirms that tech companies are woefully behind in including women among their board members and highest-paid executives — not to mention the engineering ranks.

Of California’s 400 biggest public companies, technology companies have some of the lowest percentages of women directors and executives, according to the annual Study of California Women Business Leaders by the University of California, Davis, and Watermark, a Bay Area organization that tries to increase the number of women business leaders.

“This is a place where technology companies are way behind,” said Marilyn Nagel, chief executive of Watermark.

The software and semiconductor sectors have the lowest percentages of women among the five highest-paid executives in a company, with 4.4 percent and 2.7 percent, according to the study. On average, fewer than one in 28 of the highest-paid tech executives is a woman.

Only 5.2 percent of directors in the semiconductor sector are women and just 7.7 percent have more than one woman director, compared with 40 percent of companies in all other industries. Just over 9 percent of directors in the software sector are women.

There are a few notable exceptions. Advent Software is the No. 2 company on the study’s list of the top California companies in terms of women leaders. Thirty-six percent of its executives and directors are women, including the chief executive, Stephanie DiMarco. Hewlett-Packard is No. 6, with 35 percent women executives, including the chief executive, Meg Whitman. Yahoo is the only other tech company in the top 25, with 27 percent women leaders, though its chief executive, Carol Bartz, recently left.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen tech companies land on the study’s list of big public companies with no women directors, including Adobe Systems, Demand Media, LeapFrog, Nvidia and National Semiconductor. The same is true for top executives. Tech companies with none that are women include Apple, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Qualcomm and Tesla Motors.

Part of the problem, Ms. Nagel said, is that tech companies often look for board members who have been chief executives of other tech companies, and just 3 percent of tech chief executives are women. Instead, they should broaden their search to look for women in other senior positions at tech companies or chief executives in other sectors, she said.

And because tech companies tend to be global, they focus more on racial diversity than gender diversity, she said. As a result, there are fewer programs in place to encourage women to join or rise in tech companies. Tech companies also struggle to recruit female engineers even at the lowest levels, in part because girls do not commonly pursue computer science in school.

“Tech companies don’t always focus on building the pipeline of women, and so there are not women who are moving up as rapidly,” Ms. Nagel said. “There are not programs in place to ensure that women take a seat at the table in the uppermost echelons of business.”

Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit and a coach to many tech companies, said in a statement that gender diversity at the company helps it attract more talented people.

“Simply put, we consider gender diversity at top levels a necessity for hiring and keeping great talent,” he said. Still, Intuit has no women among the top five highest-paid women executives, according to the study.

Casting a wider net, the study also looked at California companies in the Fortune 1000. Among those, Hewlett-Packard has four women directors and Intel has three, including its chairwoman, Jane Shaw. Cisco, Google and Oracle have two each and Apple has one.

The numbers are worse for the highest-paid executives. Hewlett-Packard has two women on that list, while Google and Oracle have just one and Apple, Intel and Cisco have none.

It is not just tech companies in California that fail to hire enough women leaders, the study said. At California’s biggest public companies, only about 10 percent of the board members and top executives are women, a level that has not changed much in the seven years that UC Davis has done the study. That is even though gender-diverse boards show a 53 percent higher return on equity, the study found.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=15e3dba70c415f826a51f818aa8e6f23

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: silicon valley, software sector, watermark

Phones and Tablets Getting Game Power In the Cloud

December 8, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

We can shop on our phones and read magazines on our tablets. But playing high-end video games on a mobile device has been out of the question.

That might be about to change.

OnLive, a Silicon Valley start-up, on Thursday plans to release software that will let people play the richest, most graphically intense games on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as on Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other devices based on Google’s Android software. In the past, these games have been far beyond the relatively anemic computing power of such devices, requiring the horsepower of a PC or a console. But OnLive runs all of the games on its service entirely on powerful server computers in its data centers and delivers them over the Internet, through so-called cloud computing.

Other companies are trying to do the same thing, including Gaikai, a start-up based in Los Angeles. If they succeed, a shift to cloud gaming could have big implications for the incumbent powers in the video game business, mainly the console makers Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. That is because running games in data centers means that consoles in the home can be far less powerful, relieving consumers of the need to buy a new generation of hardware in the future.

At the same time, moving gaming into the cloud could help push the boundaries of what cloud computing can do, even on relatively low-powered mobile devices.

Everything from FarmVille on Facebook to data backup services like Apple’s iCloud to Netflix’s streaming movie service are considered cloud applications. But playing high-end games in the cloud presents a much bigger technical challenge because of the importance of eliminating any lag between the moment a player takes an action in a game on his or her device, and when the game responds on the screen. Even split-second delays can turn serious gamers off.

OnLive says it has solved this problem by figuring out a method of efficiently packaging video images of a live game that it delivers over the Internet, and that allows for instantaneous response to actions by players as they control the movement of characters within a game.

In a recent demonstration in Seattle, Steve Perlman, the chief executive and founder of OnLive, showed a collection of well-known high-end games, including L.A. Noire and Unreal Tournament 3, on an iPad, Android phones and a Kindle Fire.

Although the games were running on computers in an OnLive data center in Northern California, they responded immediately when a player moved a character around. Some games on the service have been adapted to respond to fingers on a touch screen, but many work better with a $50 wireless controller sold by OnLive. That’s cheaper than buying a traditional game console, which starts at about $150.

“It’s amazing the performance he’s getting out of all these tablets,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering Group.

Mr. Perlman said OnLive would also soon introduce a service that let people run a full Windows desktop on iPads and other mobile devices, including Web browsers that can show Web sites with Flash, an Adobe graphics technology that is not otherwise available on iPads.

Last year, OnLive introduced an earlier iteration of its service, letting people play games first on PCs, Macs and television sets through a small $99 device it calls the MicroConsole.

Mr. Perlman predicted that the growing capabilities of the cloud, along with the high costs of introducing a new console, would lead to big changes in the business. Hardware makers can lose billions of dollars on new game systems before eventually recouping their investments through royalties from game sales.

“It’s our view that probably there won’t be another console and that this current generation is the last,” Mr. Perlman said. “The economics can’t support it anymore.”

However, even people who believe strongly that cloud gaming will become an important part of the market say they think that prediction is an overstatement. Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said cloud gaming was still too new for serious gamers to switch their habits. Internet connections in some areas are not fast and reliable enough for gamers to depend on a cloud gaming service all the time.

“Realistically, there’s one more” generation of consoles coming, Mr. Pachter said. “It will take a while for people to trust the cloud and adapt.”

Nintendo has already announced plans for a new machine, the Wii U, expected to be released next year. But Sony and Microsoft don’t appear to be in any rush to introduce new consoles. It has been five and six years, respectively, since the companies introduced the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and neither company is talking about plans for a new system. Console makers used to introduce new game systems every five to six years. “We’ve got a lot of life left in the current generation of PlayStation with PS3,” said Patrick Seybold, a spokesman for Sony’s United States games division.

Some cloud gaming proponents say they believe future consoles are likely to embrace the technology, rather than risk being replaced by it. “Anyone making consoles for the future would be crazy not to have cloud gaming support,” said David Perry, Gaikai’s C.E.O.

Support from game publishers can make or break OnLive and it isn’t clear how eager some of the more prominent ones are to join the service, which has a variety of payment plans for consumers, from a $10 monthly rental to an option for buying games for $2 to $50. The industry’s biggest blockbuster, the Call of Duty series from Activision Blizzard, isn’t available on the service, for example.

An executive of one publisher working with OnLive, Jason Kingsley, the chief executive of Rebellion, predicted that most game makers would warm to cloud gaming services over time.

“There will always be some people who say, ‘We don’t want to engage in this, it’s horrible,’ ” Mr. Kingsley said. “I can’t see why it shouldn’t be part of the mix.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6246c72f3a71e4a1a6e5f0d44f3bb27f

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: computing power, mobile devices, silicon valley

Google’s Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship

November 10, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Mr. Page has never been more impatient than he is now. He is on an urgent mission to pull Google through a midlife crisis that threatens to knock it off its perch as the coolest company in Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1998, Google is not yet 15, but in tech years, it is an aging giant that moves a lot slower than it did when it was a hot start-up. It is losing employees to the new, hotter start-ups, and is being pushed around by government regulators and competitors like Facebook, Apple and Amazon, which are all vying for people’s online time.

So Mr. Page, Google’s co-founder and former chief executive, who returned to the top job in April, is making changes large and small. He dropped more than 25 projects, saying they were not popular enough. He masterminded Google’s biggest deal by billions, the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility bid, a bold move that positions the company to enter the hardware business.

Borrowing from the playbooks of executives like Steven P. Jobs and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, he has put his personal imprint on the corporate culture, from discouraging excessive use of e-mail to embracing quick, unilateral decision-making — by him, if need be.

“Ever since taking over as C.E.O., I have focused much of my energy on increasing Google’s velocity and execution, and we’re beginning to see results,” Mr. Page, 38, told analysts recently.

Naysayers fret that in his rush to refocus the company, and especially in ending projects, he risks squelching Google’s trademark innovation, which bubbles up when engineers are given the time to experiment. “He’s going to lose some people at the end of the day,” said one employee who, like others, agreed to speak only anonymously because the company bars them from talking to the press without prior approval.

“He’s certainly been active,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst covering Google at Citigroup. “Whether he’ll be active and successful, we don’t know.”

His new responsibilities have changed Mr. Page, an engineer by training and personality. Judging by his few public appearances, he has learned to talk the corporate talk to shareholders and analysts, though he still generally declines to speak to the press, including for this article.

He even broke down and hired an administrative assistant, after letting his previous one go years ago. She schedules him for those dreaded meetings. But they are only 50 minutes long, because in one of his first companywide memos after he took the job, he decreed that hourlong meetings must allow time for a bathroom break in between.

Despite the many external pressures on Google, it is dominant in its business and highly profitable. But, when asked at a recent conference about the biggest threat to his company, Mr. Page answered in one word, “Google.”

The problem was that the company had ballooned so quickly — it now has more than 31,000 employees and $27.3 billion in revenue so far this year — that it had become sclerotic. A triumvirate of Mr. Page, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s former chief and current chairman, had to agree before anything could be done. The unwieldy management and glacial pace of decision-making were particularly noticeable in the Valley, where start-ups overtake behemoths in months.

It is different now.

“It’s much more of a style like Steve Jobs than the three-headed monster that Google was,” said a former Google executive who has spoken with current executives about the changes and spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When Eric was there, you’d walk into a product meeting or a senior staff meeting, and everyone got to weigh in on every decision. Larry is much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f9f992c56b722ae784b5f1550a779dde

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: bold move, playbooks, silicon valley

Grading the Digital School: At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait

October 22, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.

“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt. He uses an iPad and a smartphone. But he says his daughter, a fifth grader, “doesn’t know how to use Google,” and his son is just learning. (Starting in eighth grade, the school endorses the limited use of gadgets.)

Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection. Mr. Eagle, like other parents, sees no contradiction. Technology, he says, has its time and place: “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.”

While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.

On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.

Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.

In second grade, students standing in a circle learned language skills by repeating verses after the teacher, while simultaneously playing catch with bean bags. It’s an exercise aimed at synchronizing body and brain. Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the divine.

Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples, quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.

“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I had their attention?”

Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this leads to better test scores or other measurable gains.

Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades. And they would be the first to admit that their early-grade students may not score well on such tests because, they say, they don’t drill them on a standardized math and reading curriculum.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5e5c7e270e3e47e1b0b6649e8768a50e

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: computer science degree, silicon valley, teaching philosophy

Steven P. Jobs, 1955-2011: Steve Jobs of Apple Dies at 56

October 6, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

A friend of the family said that Mr. Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer, with which he waged a long and public struggle, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.

“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.

Tributes to Mr. Jobs flowed quickly on Wednesday evening, in formal statements and in the flow of social networks, with President Obama, technology industry leaders and legions of Apple fans weighing in.

A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”

Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.

Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.

Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.

It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.

“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”

“Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

Mr. Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007.

Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 5, 2011

An earlier version of this obituary incorrectly identified the city where Mr. Jobs graduated from high school. It was Cupertino, not Los Altos. It also misstated the year in which NeXT shifted its focus from the education to the business market as 1986. The change occurred in 1993.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2ba838c1bb33c104af45cbffd8d59a34

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: silicon valley, technology industry leaders

Steve Jobs of Apple Dies at 56

October 6, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

A friend of the family said that Mr. Jobs died of complications from his long battle with pancreatic cancer, with which he waged a long and public struggle, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

“For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder. “I will miss Steve immensely.”

A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”

Steve Lohr contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2ba838c1bb33c104af45cbffd8d59a34

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: school friend, silicon valley, steve jobs

The Bay Citizen: Bay Area Thieves Seeking Gold Target Indian-Americans

September 30, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

“He said, ‘You’ll get hurt if you do anything,’ ” the husband later said, asking that his family and their street not be identified for fear of being further victimized. “They took us into the bedroom and made us kneel down. I was very scared that we might be shot.”

But the invaders were not there to kill — they wanted gold. The men ripped chains off the wife’s neck, tore at the husband’s bracelet and then ransacked the home until they found the rest of the jewelry, worth as much as $25,000. The thieves have not been caught.

That the family had so much gold is not unusual. As immigrants from India, it is their tradition to own and wear gold. The precious metal indicates prosperity, is a means of savings, and some gold jewelry can signify a woman’s marital status. It is a common wedding gift in many Indian cultures.

Thieves, it appears, have learned of these traditions, leading to a rash of robberies throughout Silicon Valley’s Indian-American communities in recent months. Indian-Americans are one of the fastest-growing Bay Area populations, and in Santa Clara County alone their number nearly doubled, to 111,000, in the past decade, according to the United States census.

The exact number of gold thefts is difficult to determine because the crimes have happened in several jurisdictions and victims’ ethnicity is not always made public. But interviews with the police, government and civic leaders, and representatives of the region’s Indian-American community confirmed the trend and growing alarm.

“It increased significantly nine months ago,” said Anu Natarajian, a Fremont city councilwoman. “It’s not a random thing that’s happening. People are afraid. People are nervous about it.”

Sgt. Jeff Swadener of the Fremont Police Department said Indian-Americans were known for owning high-quality gold of 20 and 22 karats. With the price of gold surging since the recession began ($1,614 per ounce on Thursday), that makes them lucrative targets.

“You’ll get just as much out of a house as you would robbing a bank,” Sergeant Swadener said, adding that criminals also know that the criminal charges for burglarizing homes are lesser than those for robbing a bank.

Most of the thefts have happened while residents were not home, and had inadvertently advertised the fact through another tradition: they leave their shoes outside the home on stoops or in racks.

“No shoes, no one home,” Sergeant Swadener said.

But the incident in Fremont has elevated the crimes to a new level of concern. The home invasion was ignored by mainstream news media, but the news that a family, including a young boy, was forced to kneel as if awaiting execution has swept through the Indian-American community.

“We got concerned when we heard the family was held at gunpoint,” said Krati Rungta, co-founder of Bay Area Desi, a year-old Web site for Indians. Ms. Rungta said people worried that their traditions had made them “easy targets.”

Tanuja Bahah, executive director of the Indian Community Center in Milpitas, said, “In India, gold is seen as security.” For women who did not work outside their home, Ms. Bahah said, gold represents a nest egg of reliable value.

Indeed, gold has taken on such meaning for many since the recent recession began, not just those of Indian heritage. With gold prices so high, the nation has seen a proliferation in businesses that buy jewelry for its gold value, often with no questions asked, allowing thieves to easily and quickly profit from stolen goods.

Robberies of gold jewelry have been reported throughout the Bay Area in recent months, including at BART stations, and on Sept. 18 a gold dealer in Hayward was shot to death at his home.

A sense of urgency about being singled out is emerging among Indian-Americans. There is talk of leaving old shoes outside the front door, so it would appear that a home was occupied. In the Fremont area where the family was robbed, residents have asked for more police patrols and are forming a neighborhood crime watch group.

That effort is helping the traumatized family recover, though slowly. “Every time someone rings the doorbell, we feel a twitch of fear,” the husband said.

sjames@baycitizen.org

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3dfbaa48dc96b799e4df813cbed42d24

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: robberies, silicon valley, wedding gift

Common Sense: Voting to Hire a Chief Without Meeting Him

September 22, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The answer, say many involved in the process, lies squarely with the troubled Hewlett board. “It has got to be the worst board in the history of business,” Tom Perkins, a former H.P. director and a Silicon Valley legend, told me.

Interviews with several current and former directors and people close to them involved in the search that resulted in the hiring of Mr. Apotheker reveal a board that, while composed of many accomplished individuals, as a group was rife with animosities, suspicion, distrust, personal ambitions and jockeying for power that rendered it nearly dysfunctional.

Among their revelations: when the search committee of four directors narrowed the candidates to three finalists, no one else on the board was willing to interview them. And when the committee finally chose Mr. Apotheker and again suggested that other directors meet him, no one did. Remarkably, when the 12-member board voted to name Mr. Apotheker as the successor to the recently ousted chief executive, Mark Hurd, most board members had never met Mr. Apotheker.

“I admit it was highly unusual,” one board member who hadn’t met Mr. Apotheker told me. “But we were just too exhausted from all the infighting.” During Mr. Apotheker’s brief tenure, once-proud H.P. has become a laughingstock in Silicon Valley. Its results have weakened, its stock has plummeted and his strategy shifts have puzzled people inside and outside the company. Hewlett had no immediate comment.

The immediate cause of dissension was the board’s decision in August 2010 to demand the resignation of Mr. Hurd, who had himself assumed the top position in the midst of board leaks and a phone pretexting scandal surrounding efforts to determine the source of the leaks that had laid bare irreconcilable differences among directors. He had replaced Carly Fiorina, who was also summarily ousted by the board.

Though not without detractors, Mr. Hurd pulled off one of the great rescue missions in American corporate history, refocusing the strife-ridden company and leading it to five years of revenue gains and a stock that soared 130 percent. Then came an incendiary letter from the activist lawyer Gloria Allred, charging that Mr. Hurd had sexually harassed a former soft-core pornography actress named Jodie Fisher, whom he had hired as a consultant for H.P. The accusations set off another fierce board battle.

The board named a committee headed by Robert L. Ryan, a former Medtronic executive and H.P.’s lead director, and Lucille Salhany, another director who was a former chairwoman of Fox Broadcasting, to investigate the accusations. An outside law firm concluded that Mr. Hurd was innocent of the harassment charges but had submitted false expense reports in what seemed an effort to conceal the relationship. Mr. Hurd denied having an affair with Ms. Fisher (as he has since done publicly) and said his assistant had first contacted her after seeing her on a reality television program.

As one director told me, “We said, ‘Mark, just tell us the truth.’ He stuck to this story. He interviewed the woman twice, there was no search firm, no job posting, no discussion with anyone else. He met with her alone on more than one occasion. To be the hostess at a party? Give me a break.” Complicating matters was evidence H.P. obtained from Mr. Hurd’s office computer showing that he had viewed videos of Ms. Fisher.

Once some board members became convinced that Mr. Hurd had not been totally truthful, they insisted he had to be fired. Mr. Ryan convened a meeting to decide Mr. Hurd’s fate by saying that he wanted to give every director an opportunity to speak, but that he would begin.

“I don’t believe him,” he said bluntly, and noted that under H.P.’s employee guidelines, any other employee who lied to the board would be fired. He was strongly backed by Ms. Salhany.

Two other members, Joel Z. Hyatt, a media executive and founder of Hyatt Legal Plans, and John Joyce, a former private equity partner, were adamant that Mr. Hurd should stay, at least long enough to groom a successor and arrange for an orderly transition.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a59964766875a3cff7b54a499f628e2d

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: board members, distrust, silicon valley

Corner Office: Andrew M. Thompson: Andrew Thompson of Proteus, on Direct Feedback

September 18, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Q. Can you talk about how to create an innovative culture?

A. I’ve been an entrepreneur for 22 years in Silicon Valley, so that essentially creates a life that’s defined by doing things that are innovative and different. When you build a company or organization that’s going to take on those kinds of challenges, I think there are two things that are really important.

One is that you reward innovative and new things in ways that are very obvious and are very visible — it’s the culture of what you talk about, what you celebrate, what you reward, what you make visible. For example, in this company, which is very heavily driven by intellectual property, if you file a patent or have your name on a patent, we give you a little foam brain.

But then, more important, right in our front lobby, there are shelves of big glass jars and everyone’s name in the company is on one of them — they’re like an apothecary jar. And that’s where your brains go. And so we have this huge wall that’s full of brains.

There’s no money in it. We don’t pay people to file patents because we’re an innovative company. That’s part of your job. But we recognize it and we make it extremely visible. Everyone who walks in the front door just looks and says “wow.” That’s a very specific and extremely powerful way that we promote and reward innovation.

But there’s another thing that I think is probably a little less obvious: in the context of being an innovative company, it’s really important that you don’t penalize failure. In an innovative company, and particularly for a start-up company, you have to take risk. So you have to have a very strong bias to action over analytics, and for learning from mistakes and moving forward.

That’s very much what I call a leadership culture as opposed to a management culture, and it’s very counterintuitive to many people who come from large organizations where failure is absolutely clobbered. I want to be clear about this: It’s not that you reward failure. You don’t penalize it. What you focus on much more is risk-taking and a bias to action. So the real sin in a small company is not making a mistake, it’s not moving. That doesn’t always mean you move in the right direction. But if you discover you’re moving in the wrong direction, you change direction. It’s fairly easy to see and to reward people who have those instincts.

Q. Tell me more about that.

A. In our company, at the senior team level, we talk about everybody in the company twice a year in a very structured way, where we spend several hours identifying people who we think are our golden seed. These are people who have very strong leadership instincts, who understand how to move the ball forward. They know how to take risks, and how to either build on work that’s successful, or they are able to say that something doesn’t work, and let’s move on, let’s change that. And those people we try to promote quickly.

Q. How do you reinforce this in the culture of your company more broadly?

A. If we have something we want to celebrate or talk about — let’s say we promote someone or want to recognize someone, for example — we’ll talk about it in a meeting. A big part of building a culture is around stories, right? So the stories have to be real, and they have to be vivid. If you’ve got someone who’s an effective risk taker, you make that very clear and you tell the story. You want these things to become legends.

Q. What are some other things you do?

A. Culture in our company is a really big deal, and we have a values system built around quality, teamwork and leadership. One of the activities around that cultural framework is the idea that employees can recognize each other — groups or teams can recognize or be recognized by other employees for doing things that specifically demonstrate those values.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/business/andrew-thompson-of-proteus-on-direct-feedback.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: intellectual property, patents, silicon valley

DealBook: Potential Buyers Renew Their Interest in Yahoo

September 16, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Kimberly White/Bloomberg NewsYahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

With potential buyers circling above, Yahoo, the once-mighty online empire, is preparing to sell.

The technology giant, which is weighing a sale of all or parts of its business, has attracted the attention of several buyout shops and strategic investors, including the private equity firm Silver Lake, which has already approached Yahoo about a potential bid, two people close to Yahoo said.

Silver Lake, which is working with the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, has been quietly studying a possible bid for the last six months, one person said. Other potential bidders for Yahoo or its assets include Microsoft and the Alibaba Group.

The renewed interest in Yahoo comes as the company faces a critical juncture.

The sprawling Internet media company, which rose to prominence in the late 1990s for its popular portal, has fallen behind in recent years. While rivals like Google and upstarts like Facebook have boomed in the new Web, Yahoo has struggled to keep pace with the shifting digital landscape.

Last week, in a moment that starkly portrayed its troubles, the board dismissed its chief executive, Carol A. Bartz, by phone. Ms. Bartz, well known in Silicon Valley for her brash attitude and comfort with expletives, joined Yahoo less than three years earlier.

Yahoo’s board discussed Silver Lake’s approach during its meeting on Wednesday and hired Allen Company as its investment bank for a continuing review of Yahoo’s business. The board also talked about Yahoo’s Asian assets, which include a 40 percent stake in the Alibaba Group, a Chinese e-commerce company, and a stake of about 35 percent in Yahoo Japan. In addition to Allen Company, Yahoo is working with UBS, which already advises the company on its options for its stake in Yahoo Japan.

The Asian investments complicate any buyout of Yahoo.

The board has yet to decide whether to keep those assets, sell them or spin them off, the individuals said. Many analysts consider those holdings the crown jewels of its portfolio, collectively worth more than the sum of the rest of its operations.

The relationship between Yahoo and Jack Ma, Alibaba’s chief executive, is strained over a number of issues, most recently the fate of the online payment service AliPay. Last year, Alibaba spun off AliPay into a separate company that Mr. Ma controlled. Yahoo learned of the transfer only after the fact and complained that it had been done by Mr. Ma without the approval of Alibaba’s board.

Alibaba and Yahoo reached a deal in July that settled their disagreement. But the relationship between Yahoo and Mr. Ma, who has long said that he wanted to buy back Yahoo’s stake in his company, remains strained.

Yahoo, Microsoft, Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. Individuals close to the matter spoke on the condition they not be identified because the talks were confidential.

For Yahoo, which rejected a bid from Microsoft in 2008, the crowd of suitors is a familiar one. According to two people with knowledge of the situation, Providence Partners and Peter Chernin, the former chief operating officer of the News Corporation, also are studying a possible bid. This year, Mr. Chernin approached Yahoo about a possible deal, according to one person. But he was rebuffed. Meanwhile, Silver Lake, which recently profited from the sale of Skype to Microsoft, has long been said to be a potential buyer.

Any deal, analysts say, will require substantial financial backing. Yahoo’s market capitalization currently stands at $18.8 billion. Yahoo, according to two people, is considering hiring a third bank which could help provide financing. Although analysts have described the company as a “deteriorating asset,” it is still one of the Web’s largest properties.

“Yahoo is still very important to the ecosystem,” said Scott Raney, a partner with Redpoint Ventures. “It has significant scale and it has some of the more interesting advertising technology out there,” he added.

Yahoo is facing intense pressure from investors to do something. Daniel Loeb, the founder of Third Point, a hedge fund that owns a 5 percent stake in Yahoo, called for the removal of Roy Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman, and of other board members.

AllThingsD earlier reported the list of potential buyers for Yahoo.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9a64279c5c77be8b73855671babcbba8

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: critical juncture, silicon valley, technology giant

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