Meg Whitman to Step Down as HPE CEO

If I remember correctly she said at her last HPE earnings call, "I am not going anywhere". She also stated she had much more work to do at HPE.

Now that was in response to Uber's courtship but this was so sudden you have to wonder what prompted it?

Perhaps CEOs lie to both investors and their employees.

Kind of. The manager in my team (hpe) hasn't been replaced for a few months after quitting, then the project was killed / people let go. Meanwhile, all the communication from the top was pretty much "this is an important project for us". And that's one of the reasons I'm unlikely to work in a big corp in the future.

Never trust the official communications, in fact you should treat them counter factually. More important, you need to be in some circle of know for highly political companies.

Why counter factually? I agree that they can be largely ignored and it's the actions that should be observed. But if things go well, some good chart will be presented, if not, some other good chart will be presented. What's the reason to go the opposite way?

If the higher ups feel the need to communicate how important X is to the company, it is usually because X is on shaky ground. If you knew nothing about X before, you know that about it now. If you think about the reasons behind why the message was communicated, rather than the message itself, you can get a lot more real knowledge out of it.

This should be a key point to surviving in the corporate world. Whenever the CEO or VP of engineering spoke, I always paid attention to what was glossed over or conveniently omitted from the official line. While I found it all somewhat distasteful and duplicitous, it's the game. As such, I occasionally found it entertaining to discern what was really being communicated to me. Most other people take these kinds of official communication at face value. Never turn off your brain at work.

And what specific benefits did you get from this? What actionable insights did you get that your colleagues missed out on?

I've known quite a few monday morning quarterbacks/sophomore kremlinologists/cynics who would regale anyone who'd listen with their analysis of what management is really doing and (especially) what they obviously should have done. What is less clear is how this deep insight ever led to any actionable intelligence at all.