Ronn Torossian Ronn Torossian
The tech industry is in quite a state. Some companies are exploding, defining industries and putting out one consumer hit after another. Others are trying to maintain a reputation or recover former glory.

For the past several years, Hewlett-Packard has found itself squarely in the latter category. A formerly dominant player in the tech game who was caught unprepared for the rapid changes in consumer computer use and appetites. The world went mobile in the veritable blink of an eye, and HP struggled to realize the depth of the change and the immediacy of the need to shift.

But, better late than never, the company has decided to make some changes. First, though, it need to do some things that will create some PR issues for the company. These steps will force the company to cut up to 4,000 jobs over the next three years. This is more than double the number of jobs the company said it would cut this fiscal year.

Now, when you consider HP has more than 50,000 employees, it may not seem like too dire a situation, but every one of those people represents a PR struggle that could loom into a crisis. Each one is a person with a sphere of influence who could create a small but hearty negative narrative about HP: how the company was too slow to act and react, how it didn’t see the world changing and how its head-in-the-sand mentality cost “me” my job … even if only the folks in their immediate circle are on board with this line of thinking, that’s potentially 40 to 50 thousand people who now have a bad vibe about HP.

Worse, this may just be the tip of the iceberg. HP is one of two companies that resulted from the split of the former Hewlett Packard, Inc. last year. The two companies became HP, which focused on PCs, printers and accessories and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which focuses mainly on servers and data centers.

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Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR, one of America’s leading independently owned public relations firms.