When George W Bush wanted a vice-president, he appointed Dick Cheney to head up a search team. When the team reported back, the selected candidate turned out to be…Dick Cheney. The Cadence board, having been a major contributor to Cadence’s problems through their selection of executive management and guidance given them, have also been off searching for a new CEO. And the selected candidate is…Lip-Bu Tan, member of the Cadence board.
Along with that are a number of conflicts of interest. Lip-Bu will remain chairman of Walden International, a venture fund which he founded, but nothing has yet been said about Flextronics, SMIC, MindTree, Creative Technology and probably other places where he is also on the board.
Most of the discussion about who should be CEO has centered around whether it would be better to have an insider who knows a lot about EDA, or someone from outside who knows nothing about EDA but at least doesn’t come with all that EDA baggage. But now we have a different hybrid, someone who doesn’t know that much about EDA but comes with all the baggage anyway.
I don’t have any inside information but I assume that it turned out to be impossible to tempt anyone competent to take the CEO position with the company, industry and economy in the state it is. “I’ll just keep my nice senior VP position at Megacorp, thank you.” So it is time for the Cadence board and insiders to clean up their own mess and get the company into good enough shape that they can tempt a new leader to take over in a couple of years.
Of course, my view is that there is plenty of EDA knowledge inside Cadence already but it needs to be lead in a different way to be successful again. At least Lip-Bu has one good thing to work with: people are not all baling out of Cadence since there is really nowhere else to go right now. So he has time, which is often one of the factors in shortest supply when trying to turn a company around.