Carly Fiorina no longer HP CEO

It's official - Carly Fiorina is no longer HP CEO. I remember being at an HP Labs conference when the Compaq merger closed. The HP engineers and scientists were all crying. No one thought it was a good move. Since then, HP has gone downhill. I'm not sure what they are still doing in the commodity PC business - they should focus on imaging and printers. HP's market cap is up $7B today on the news!

Carly is a tremendously effective speaker and communicator. She isn't dumb, either. But, she is in no way a technologist. The job requirements for the CEO position in a public technology company are tremendous. The set of people who can do the job well is very, very small. Having said this, I believe that CEOs are overpaid these days - in no way should someone who merely takes over control of an existing successful enterprise be paid $100M - that should be reserved for someone (an entrepreneur) who actually creates such an enterprise.

A modern CEO has to have the following qualities:
1) Must communicate well with financial markets
2) Must communicate well within the company, to engineers as well as marketers
3) Must be able to get by on 4 hours of sleep and endure 14 hour work days for years on end
4) Must understand technical issues well enough to have strategic vision
5) Must be decisive - cannot lose sleep over hard decisions
6) Must inspire confidence and exhibit leadership, both at the small team and enterprise level

I would say Carly only fell short in quality (4). But that was enough for a disaster! If I had to pick an ideal CEO, I would have to go with Steve Jobs. No one has his innate feel for both technology and marketing, and no one is as willing to take bet-the-farm risks (OS X, iPod, Mac Mini...).

See here for reaction from tech geeks and HP employees.