Its no mystery why CEOs make huge amounts of money. The good ones have unique
skill sets, combining leadership, a strong sense of anticipating market trends
and seemingly flawless execution. But they possess something else that's often
overlooked: good time management. Only a few CEOs like Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL
) former boss, Steve Jobs have the mental bandwidth to micromanage a global
operation. Things get even tougher when a company is experiencing big-time
problems. A prime example is Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ ). The company has
terminated three CEOs in the past six years. It's a veritable executive
Bermuda Triangle. The latest CEO to walk through the Hewlett-Packard turnstile
is Meg Whitman. And she has a stellar background. She was critical in building
eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY ) into a dot-com powerhouse. She also had executive positions
at companies like Hasbro (NASDAQ: HAS ), FTD and Disney (NYSE: DIS ). And
Whitmans compensation at HPQ? An annual salary of $1 OK, and a big slug of
options, too. She definitely believes in the upside. But a troubling
announcement came out this week: Whitman joined the board of a dot-com start-up
company, Zaarly, that has created a marketplace that allows people to post
offers say, to have their house cleaned or find someone to teach them how to
play the drums. It's kind of like a next-generation craigslist. Doesn't
Whitman have enough on her plate already as the head of a $50 billion market-cap
company? Not to mention Whitman also serves on the boards of Procter & Gamble
(NYSE: PG ) and Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP ). Her time seems crunched as is. Whitman
needs to figure out how to stabilize Hewlett-Packard and repair the companys
loss of confidence with investors, as HPQ stock has lost about 40% of its value
this year. She also needs to determine whether to keep or unload the companys PC
business, as well as come up with a software strategy that can deal with intense
competition. HP recently spent $10 billion on Autonomy, which will be at the
core of this segment. It's a lot of work, and Whitman definitely has a history
of success. But if she continues to pile up the outside distractions, she might
be setting Hewlett-Packard up for another leadership failure. Tom Taulli runs
the InvestorPlace blog " IPOPlaybook ," a site dedicated to the hottest news
and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of "All About
Short Selling" and "All About Commodities." Follow him on Twitter at
@ttaulli . As of this writing, he did not own a position in any of the
aforementioned stocks.
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