Four Leaving HP Board Of Directors

Hewlett-Packard is making big changes to its board of directors, naming five new members and losing four.

Joel Hyatt, John Joyce, Robert Ryan and Lucille Salhany are not standing for re-election at the company's annual stockholders meeting in March.

The new directors are Shumeet Banerji, chief executive of Booz & Company; Gary Reiner, former chief information officer of General Electric and a current special advisor to private equity firm General Atlantic; Patricia Russo, former chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent; Dominique Senequier, chief executive officer of AXA Private Equity; and Meg Whitman, former president and chief executive officer of eBay Inc.

The five new directors will have to be voted in by the shareholders at the annual meeting. HP did not say what prompted the changes.

The addition of these new directors will further diversify the outstanding talents and wide-ranging experience that our directors already bring to HP, said Raymond J. Lane, non-executive chairman of the board of directors, in a statement.

Perhaps the best-known of the new directors is Meg Whitman, who, besides her work at eBay, was also a candidate for governor of California.

The departing group also has its share of political aspirants; Hyatt ran for the Ohio Senate seat held by his father-in-law, Howard Metzenbaum, in 1994 (he was defeated). He has served on HP's board since 2007.

John Joyce is a 30-year veteran of IBM, who served as managing director at Silver Lake, a private equity firm from 2005 until September 2010. He has been on HP's board since 2007. Robert Ryan, a former chief financial officer of Medtronic, has been on the board since 2008.

Salhany is the longest-serving director to be leaving, having been on the board since 2002. She is a partner and director of Echo Bridge Entertainment, an independent film distribution company.

Calls to HP for comment were not returned.