HP and journalists settle spy claims

CNET

HP settled claims on Wednesday with four reporters at the heart of a scandal involving claims that the world's biggest PC maker engaged in corporate espionage to plug a boardroom leak. HP and Terry Gross, the attorney representing the journalists, said the company would donate money to several charities chosen by the journalists as part of the terms of the settlement. They did not say how much.

"The matter has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties, and we are pleased to put this matter behind us," said Hewlett-Packard spokesman Emma McCulloch. She said the company was pleased the money would go to charities.

The scandal, which came to light in late 2006, focused on allegations that Hewlett-Packard hired investigators who impersonated reporters, board members, and employees to obtain private phone records to find the source of leaks to the media in 2005 and 2006. The two sides have been holding settlement discussions since December 2006, Gross said. "It was hard fought to get to a resolution," Gross told Reuters. "I would have expected that they would have taken a tone a long time ago that was basically 'We did wrong. We should make up for it,'" he said. A separate lawsuit filed against HP by three CNET News.com reporters is still pending in a San Francisco court. Those reporters were not part of this settlement.

Hurd Rebuilds HP by Debating `Every Single Dime'

Bloomberg, extr. :
Mark Hurd : "What we want to do is develop a culture that says, `Iwant to debate every single dime,'' . His cuts include spending on jobs, data centers, realestate and even file cabinets... Hurd's next challenge may be weathering a U.S. slowdown. Hurd plans to keep focusing on costs. Last year, the company generated $12 million an hour in sales while spending$11 million on operations. He wants to widen that gap.``I've had a chance to work around high-profile maniacs like Tom Siebel and seasoned guys like Lou Gerstner,'' formerleaders of Siebel Systems Inc. and IBM respectively, said TomHogan, hired by Hurd in February 2006 to run the software unit.``Mark is the most operational CEO I've ever seen". Hurd learned operations at Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp.,which he joined in 1980 as a field salesman.
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`The more you leave the kids in the room to figure it out on their own, the more trouble you're going to get,'' Hurd said. He punctuates almost every sentence with numbers -- marketstatistics, growth rates -- and draws on a flip chart. When he joined HP, expenses were rising as fast as revenue, he said. Within three months, Hurd announced plans to slash 10 percent of the workforce, or 15,000 jobs, to save $1.6 billion a year. He pared retirement benefits to save$300 million. In 2006, he announced plans to replace 85 aging datacenters with six state-of-the-art facilities. That will cut such costs to 2 percent of revenue by early 2009 from 4 percent in 2005. All these moves helped profit more than double to $7.26billion last year from 2004.``If Carly was operating at the 35,000-foot level, MarkHurd is operating from 500 feet,'' said James Post, a professor of management at Boston University.

Hurd has admitted making mistakes. After a spying scandalin 2006 led to the resignation of HP's chairman, two directors and the general counsel, Hurd took responsibility for a probe into boardroom leaks that grew into a plot to spy on directors and reporters. He acknowledged his failure to supervise the investigators and won the backing of investors and analysts after he pledged to repair the company's image.
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More cuts are planned, including combining call centers in the U.S., Hurd said. HP also aims to pare realestate outlays a third in two years by ``taking advantage of the fact that people are mobile and they don't come into the office every day,'' Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak said. ``We don't have a lot of file cabinets that are necessary.' 'That doesn't mean HP isn't investing in thebusiness, Hurd said. It spent about $7 billion last year on acquisitions, mostly software companies, and made $3 billion in capital expenditures.``You get the strategy right, get the operating model right, get the people right, I mean generally, good things happen to you,'' he said.