If the issues at stake for Hewlett-Packard weren't so serious for shareholders and employees alike, one might find some humor in the disastrous, but highly avoidable, set of circumstances that have unfolded since the surprise resignation of Mark Hurd and his appointment as co-president at Oracle.

In the interest of time, let's set aside the reasons for Hurd's abrupt and rather embarrassing exit from his former employer. Instead, let's consider that one man was sitting with the titles of HP chairman, CEO and president and credited with leading a successful turnaround of the company. And let's acknowledge that public company directors almost universally cite CEO succession planning as one of their top three responsibilities, if not their primary responsibility.

Now let's look at some rather interesting dates. Hurd's resignation from HP was made public on August 6. Then, on August 18, HP issued a press release revealing it had appointed Spencer Stuart "to handle activities related to the search for a new chief executive of the company." Today, on September 7, those "activities" are ongoing for HP.

What all this says to me is that HP's board hadn't done its succession homework. The board — in tandem with its top HR executives — should have already worked up a slate of potential internal and external successors for Hurd's role, and, for that matter, for the other most critical, global, high-profile and senior leadership roles in the company. If it had, why hasn't a successor been named yet?

The board should also have been engaged in conversations that would have enabled it to launch an immediate external search for Hurd's successor — not 12 days after the public announcement (and who knows how many days after HP's directors knew they had a crisis on their hands?), but the day after the resignation was announced.

Could it be that the HP board directors were so enamored with Hurd and the turnaround he was credited with that they winked and nodded and essentially deferred any serious succession planning for his three roles?

Sure, like other large corporations before it, HP didn't see this coming. Unfortunately, its board has fared no better in convincing shareholders and employees that it had been engaged in serious succession planning for the one person in whom they all had the most to lose. This is apparently what happens when personal relationships get in the way of the most elemental organizational preparedness.

Joseph Daniel McCool
Joseph Daniel McCool is senior contributing editor with ExecuNet and principal of management recruiting/succession advisory firm The McCool Group. He is also the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, recognized widely as "one of the best business books of 2008," and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, Escolhendo Líderes, published in June 2010.

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