Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard: No bed of roses

Fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Meg Whitman’s painful attempts to turn around floundering Hewlett-Packard in Fortune magazine, especially the portrait of just how bad things were for her when she arrived as CEO. James Bandler and Doris Burke say her first get-to-know-you meeting with company employees went extremely poorly, with engineers and managers sullen, and others glaring at her. An excerpt:

"Your comments are being live-blogged," one employee told her defiantly. Whitman challenged the man. "You all have taken leaking to a new art form," she said. "It's a sign of an unhappy company. You wish HP ill." The tapping suddenly stopped, and as the room fell silent, the mobile devices were lowered.