How to pull all of those high-profile sex scandals behind you? Simple. Hire a CEO that no one’s ever really heard of. Hire Léo Apotheker. That’s precisely what HP just did. Apotheker does have some prior CEOing experience. He was briefly in charge of SAP AG, a German software company, from April 2008 to February of this year.
Apotheker had been with that company for some time, however, having first joined its ranks in 1988.
His own history seems the polar opposite of the manner of scandal that defined his predecessor, Mark Hurd and Hurd’s own predecessor at Oracle, Charles Phillips. Hurd, of course, was pushed out of the company after the discovery of accounting irregularities–a discovery that arrived suspiciously close to the surfacing of a sexual harassment suit filed by Body of Influence 2 actress, Jodie Fisher.
Phillips’s face, meanwhile, had been plastered on billboards along with his alleged ex-mistress, YaVaughnie Wilkins.
Apotheker’s story, meanwhile, is that of a man who worked his way up the ranks of a major organization to become the one of the first Jewish child of holocaust survivors to run a major German company. In 2007, Apotheker was awarded a medal by the French Légion d’honneur. He was recognized for his contributions to the French economy.
HP’s stock dropped four percent on the news of Apotheker’s hire. It seems not everyone is excited by the prospect of HP’s new chief. Fortune reached out to members of the investment and tech communities who dropped such definitive one-word reactions as “Idiotic” and “astonishing.”
You see, Légion d’honneur awards aside, not everyone thinks that Apotheker did a bang up job running SAP AG. He did leave after seven months, after all. Why? He left involuntarily, according to Fortune, after SAP “had its clock cleaned” by Oracle and IBM.
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