Fortune on the Hurd/HP Saga

Not sure what’s going on, but Fortune published its own lengthy, well-sourced report on the Mark Hurd/Jodie Fisher/HP saga, on the same day as the WSJ. Both reports are interesting, and contain different information. The timing seems beyond coincidence, though, so I’m guessing some of the sources (presumably from the HP board) are the same.

Here’s Fortune on how HP came to hire Jodie Fisher in the first place:

When Hurd was displeased, he let people around him know, and one person who was always around was Caprice Fimbres. A former public relations account executive, Fimbres was Hurd’s “program manager,” an aide with broad sway over the CEO’s schedule.

Fimbres took on the challenge of allaying Hurd’s concerns. At some point, she began thinking about a television show she’d been watching. Fimbres was hooked on reality TV, and that summer she’d been following a particularly bad NBC series called “Age of Love.” Its gimmick was inane, even for an inane genre: “Age of Love” pitted a group of female twentysomethings — the “kittens” — against a group of fortysomethings — the “cougars” — vying for the affections of a real-life tennis star.

Apparently Fimbres concluded that experience in a made-for-TV cat fight was the ideal preparation for playing gatekeeper to one of the most important corporate CEOs in the world.

★ Saturday, 6 November 2010