If Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo have proved one thing in the past month, it’s this: Dysfunction at the top doesn’t play in industries with competitors just dying to eat your lunch.

“I just actually released a 10 worst boards of the decade, and HP was on there,” said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at GMI. “Yahoo wasn’t. Yet they do appear to have made a couple of errors of judgment over the last couple of years, both strategically and in terms of hiring decisions, and they certainly share that with HP’s board.”

Start with Hewlett-Packard. The company last week ousted its CEO, Leo Apotheker, just shy of the SAP veteran’s first anniversary at the helm and replaced him with board member and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. But replacing a CEO after less than a year is just the beginning of HP’s problems.

It’s been a revolving door at the top of the company since the firing of Carly Fiorina in 2005, after HP’s failed merger with Compaq. Since then, HP’s board has dismissed Mark Hurd on unsubstantiated allegations of sexual impropriety and fiddling with his expense account; used a private investigator to find out who was leaking board information to journalists; and hired and fired Apotheker.

And as importantly, HP has done this while competitors like IBM and Oracle grow stronger in the business software and services marketplace. On the hardware side, Apple has reinvented the personal computing space with the introduction of the iPad and iPhone.

“You would think that competition would inspire excellence, but what it seems to have done is create a situation where panic mode has set in and decisions are being made with a very short-term focus instead of looking to strategy,” Hodgson said.

Hodgson says the difference between a successful board like Apple’s and a dysfunctional one like HP’s can be seen in the recent decision by Steve Jobs to resign and the no-fuss replacement of him with Tim Cook.

“Apple has just demonstrated what succession planning is all about, and that’s something that both Yahoo and HP have failed at magnificently,” he said.

Yahoo, of course, isn’t nearly as venerable a company as HP, but it shares characteristics with the firm that founded Silicon Valley. It’s a veteran competitor in a world of upstarts, and it arguably stood still, or did the wrong things, while those upstarts passed it by.

Yahoo missed the importance of search as Google grew into a behemoth, and it failed to counter the challenge that Facebook poses to just about every Internet firm. And while it was doing this, it was going from one CEO, cofounder Jerry Yang, to the next, Carol Bartz—and then the dismissal of Bartz.

All of which leaves Yahoo a likely takeover target, and one that will probably sell for less than Microsoft was willing to pay to buy it back in 2008.

It could take months for Yahoo's situation to settle out, according to a leaked memo, as the company reviews options from hiring a new CEO to selling all or part of itself.

Lucy Marcus, CEO of Marcus Venture Consulting, writes in the Harvard Business Review blog:

One gets the sense that Yahoo and HP are hurtling from one bad decision to the next, in a (one hopes) well-intentioned frenzy to do something—anything—to stop the fire. Yet, at the same time, it also seems that, in fact, they are throwing water on an oil fire, exacerbating the problem instead of addressing it in a calm, methodical manner.

So can either Silicon Valley icon get its act, or its board, together before still more disasters strike? Well, said Hodgson, Yahoo could fetch a good price or even rebound and make a strong showing as an independent company.

As for HP, the jury’s out, but he’s not hopeful for the immediate future.

“As far as righting the mistakes of the past is concerned, I don’t think the appointment of Meg Whitman is a step in the right direction,” he said.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com