Title:
The Rise and Fall of Mark Hurd as H-P Chief
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Economics Report.
See text below
Text:
Mark Hurd got credit for building Hewlett-Packard
into the world's largest technology company. H-P is
the top seller of personal computers and printers.
It had sales last year of almost one hundred fifteen
billion dollars. Mister Hurd became chief executive
officer five years ago after H-P ousted Carly
Fiorina. Later he also became chairman. Under his
leadership H-P stock doubled in price. So the news
out of Palo Alto, California in August came to many
as a shock. Mark Hurd was out. Investigators said he
had falsified expense records to hide spending on a
woman who worked with H-P. Reports said the amount
was about twenty thousand dollars. Mister Hurd is
married. He earned twenty-four million dollars last
year. In June the former marketing contractor, Jodie
Fisher, accused Mister Hurd of sexual harassment.
Through her lawyer, she said she was "surprised and
saddened" that he lost his job. She said they had
settled her claim privately. The sometime actress
also said they never had an "intimate sexual
relationship." H-P and private investigators found
no violation of the sexual harassment policy at the
company. But they did find that Mister Hurd violated
H-P's Standards of Business Conduct. These suggest
that before employees make a decision, they should
"consider how it would look in a news story."Sexual
harassment is one of the areas of job discrimination
investigated by the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission.The federal agency received almost
thirteen thousand harassment claims last year. That
was down from over fifteen thousand ten years ago.
Men now make close to one-fifth of the complaints.
The agency finds reasonable cause in about half of
all sexual harassment claims. H-P is paying Mark
Hurd twelve million dollars plus millions more in
stock options to leave. But his resignation was not
the only exit from a job that was in the news.A
flight attendant became an overnight folk hero on
the Internet. Steven Slater apparently argued with a
passenger over baggage in the overhead bin. And once
the flight landed in New York, he deployed the
emergency slide and left the plane. Soon there was a
new expression: to "hit the slide" -- to leave a job
in a memorable way. But Steven Slater is in a lot of
legal trouble and details of exactly what happened
on that JetBlue flight and how he acted were up in
the air. And that's the VOA Special English
Economics Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
