FIORINA WAS JUST PART OF THE GENERAL PATTERN, APPARENTLY: HP's board = total mess. Read! Be appalled! And not just at the board but at the large figures people command for being in charge of fairly terrible companies like HP. There's some talk of reform here:

But when I asked her what could be done about a board like H.P.’s, she lit up. Under the new Dodd-Frank bill, she said, shareholders for the first time will be able to nominate their own candidate for the board. To do so, the nominating shareholders have to hold 3 percent of the stock — for three years.

That was a high bar, but not an impossible one, she believed. She said Calpers — the giant California public pension fund — “and a couple of its buddies could get together” and nominate a director or two.

She added: “It won’t work unless you can leverage extreme shareholder unhappiness. You can’t find a better example of that than at H.P.”

Which is something, I guess, though giant public employee unions would not be my preferred agents to reform corporate boards. Via the invaluable Felix Salmon twitter.