Hey, Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD)! How's that CEO search going?
When AMD unceremoniously dumped CEO Dirk Meyer in January, the company made itself vulnerable. The interim CEO (but full-time CFO) doesn't really want the job, a company without strong leadership is like a headless chicken, and AMD is probably not making the most of the opportunities being handed to it by Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) these days.
You'd think it was in AMD's best interest to plug this glaring hole in its leadership structure, and I mean pronto. But it's almost two months later, and we haven't heard a peep about CEO candidates yet. In the meantime, several of Meyer's most trusted lieutenants have either left AMD outright or at least announced their intentions to move on.
To put that delay into perspective, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) was leaderless for about six weeks after the Mark Hurd debacle before bringing aboard Leo Apotheker from his cushy CEO post at SAP (NYSE: SAP), a global giant in enterprise software. AMD's search is about to roll into week number nine (Paul McCartney is doing fine, thank you very much), making it slower than what the arguably more bureaucratic HP processes could muster.
Sure, AMD has less clout than giant HP and will probably not be able to pry a reigning CEO away from a rival. That makes for a slower search. I'd also hate for AMD to rush into a bad decision for obvious reasons -- the medicine has to be better than the disease.
And the market seems to have forgotten all about this. AMD's stock traded comfortably above pre-firing levels throughout most of February, buoyed by at least two positive analyst reports with price targets far above the $10 level that I still consider to be a reasonable goal. I guess management quality doesn't factor into every analyst rating, nor in every market trade.
But I'm running out of patience. Selling a stock as soon as three months after buying it cuts across the grain of my Foolish investor soul, which is why I haven't sold yet despite a remarkable lack of common sense from AMD's board and also why I'll probably give the company just a bit longer to get the CEO issue squared away. But I'm watching that "sell" button with an itchy trigger finger in the meantime.
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