Hewlett Packard Enterprise

In 2014, the old-guard Silicon Valley giant Hewlett-Packard split into two companies, HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Since then, both have found strong footing in corporate governance: Both HPE and HP made this list. (HP is No. 9.)

That fact signals a remarkable turnaround. A little over a decade ago, Hewlett-Packard’s board endured multiple controversies involving proxy fights, unusual CEO transitions, and a scandal over surveillance of colleagues and journalists that led to the departure of four directors in 2011.

With those issues far in the past, HPE’s board earned the No. 2 spot on this list thanks to strengths in board expertise, gender equality, and board independence, among other criteria. The company specializes in enterprise information tech; it has recently seen particularly robust growth from its Intelligent Edge division, a data analytics and business intelligence platform.

HPE’s board is chaired by Patricia Russo, former CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, the communications company. Russo is also a director at Merck, General Motors, and the private equity firm KKR.

HPE’s directors’ careers reflect a wide range of expertise. Daniel Ammann is a former president of General Motors, as well as its former CFO, and until recently was CEO of GM Cruise LLC, a subsidiary of GM that focuses on autonomous vehicles. Pamela Carter is a former executive at Cummins, a machinery design and manufacturing company, where she was a business unit leader and general counsel; she chairs HPE’s HR and compensation committee. 

George R. Kurtz started his career at PwC and later founded a tech company that was acquired by McAfee. Mary Agnes Wilderotter chairs the audit committee and is the former CEO of Frontier Communications.

In the non-CEO realm, Raymond Ozzie is a former chief software architect at Microsoft and a fellow of the Computer History Museum; Gary M. Reiner is the former chief information officer at General Electric; and Raymond Lane is the former COO of Oracle and partner emeritus at the famed venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.