She was a circus monkey.
Yes, but in hindsight it is obvious that "The HP Way" was dead when whatever happened that made her place at HP possible, long before she dared utter the words.
mnem
Any mechanism that makes people disposable is by definition inhumane, and should be an affront to all humanity.
Shareholder growth pressure burns everything.
It is actually more insidious than that... CEOs, at least in the United States, are overwhelmingly compensated on the basis of short term stock performance that isn't coupled with a clawback if a short term "win" turns into a long term loss. And again, in the United States, underperforming CEOs are rarely fired, and most change jobs every five years of their own volition.
So, if you assume that a "hired" CEO, being a rational creature, is going to make decisions that maximize their personal return, what's the outcome likely to be? Acquisition binges, decreased investment in R&D, spreadsheet-driven decision making, and so on, all focused on getting as much money out of the cash register and into one's own pocket as possible over a couple of years.
But the real situation is even worse. If they do manage to get fired, most CEOs walk out the door with millions of dollars in compensation and a NDA that guarantees no one will tell their next employer just how lousy they were at the job.