HPQ's newest leader joins yet another company's board

It’s no mystery why CEOs make huge amounts of money. The good ones have unique skill sets, combining leadership, a strong sense of anticipating market trends and seemingly flawless execution. But they possess something else that��s often overlooked: good time management.

Only a few CEOs — like Apple��s (NASDAQ:AAPL) former boss, Steve Jobs — have the mental bandwidth to micromanage a global operation. Things get even tougher when a company is experiencing big-time problems.

A prime example is Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ). The company has terminated three CEOs in the past six years. It��s a veritable executive Bermuda Triangle.

The latest CEO to walk through the Hewlett-Packard turnstile is Meg Whitman. And she has a stellar background. She was critical in building eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) into a dot-com powerhouse. She also had executive positions at companies like Hasbro (NASDAQ:HAS), FTD and Disney (NYSE:DIS).

And Whitman’s compensation at HPQ? An annual salary of $1 — OK, and a big slug of options, too. She definitely believes in the upside.

But a troubling announcement came out this week: Whitman joined the board of a dot-com start-up company, Zaarly, that has created a marketplace that allows people to post offers — say, to have their house cleaned or find someone to teach them how to play the drums. It��s kind of like a next-generation craigslist.

Doesn��t Whitman have enough on her plate already as the head of a $50 billion market-cap company? Not to mention Whitman also serves on the boards of Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) and Zipcar (NASDAQ:ZIP). Her time seems crunched as is.

Whitman needs to figure out how to stabilize Hewlett-Packard and repair the company’s loss of confidence with investors, as HPQ stock has lost about 40% of its value this ! year. Sh e also needs to determine whether to keep or unload the company’s PC business, as well as come up with a software strategy that can deal with intense competition. HP recently spent $10 billion on Autonomy, which will be at the core of this segment.

It��s a lot of work, and Whitman definitely has a history of success. But if she continues to pile up the outside distractions, she might be setting Hewlett-Packard up for another leadership failure.

Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog ��IPOPlaybook,�� a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of ��All About Short Selling�� and ��All About Commodities.�� Follow him on Twitter at @ttaulli. As of this writing, he did not own a position in any of the aforementioned stocks.