Posted on 09/22/2015 5:30:23 AM PDT by jimbo123
As Carly Fiorina has risen in the polls over the last week, there is renewed focus on her controversial tenure as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Yet her career at Lucent Technologies has been treated as little more than a footnote. It shouldn’t be.
“My story — from secretary to C.E.O. — is only possible in this country,” Mrs. Fiorina likes to say on the hustings.
In between her stint as a receptionist for a real estate company in the late 1970s and her being named Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive in 1999, Mrs. Fiorina worked for nearly 20 years at AT&T and then Lucent, the telephone giant’s spun-off equipment business.
It was at Lucent — Latin for “light-bearing” — that Mrs. Fiorina made her name, running several of its divisions and overseeing its successful initial public offering, which at the time was the largest I.P.O in American history. In 1998, she appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine, ranked No. 1 on its inaugural “Most Powerful Women in Business” list.
Yet her celebrated tenure at Lucent has been clouded by what happened two years after she left in 1999. The once-highflying business worth more than $250 billion at its peak nearly collapsed in the face of an accounting scandal and the telecommunications bust. The company laid off 50,000 employees in 2001 alone. Today the company, after merging with Alcatel of France, is worth only about $10 billion.
Lucent, like some its rivals, artificially burnished its financial performance through vendor financing — lending money to customers so they could buy its products. In 2004, the company settled charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that accused it of perpetrating a $1.1 billion accounting fraud.
“It’s unlikely she would have been considered for the HP job once it became clear that Lucent’s
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“While Mrs. Fiorina wasn’t responsible for the accounting fraud — she was never accused of being involved in any financial shenanigans — she did work with, and helped support, some of the employees who came under legal scrutiny for acts that took place after she left.”
So if some of your employees are crooks, let’s make you look guilty by association.
This writer attempts to do his best to drag her name thru the mud while hoping the reader doesn’t catch the truth that he’s forced to admit.
When you’re the boss you bear the responsibility for what your underlings do. Whether you are aware of it or not (and it strains credulity to think that she knew absolutely nothing).
You may, as the CEO, bear some responsibility indirectly, but the fact is, she was never even accused of wrong doing, much to the writer’s displeasure.
“My story — from secretary to C.E.O. — is only possible in this country,”
she must be good at using her head
Back in those days, it wasn’t considered accounting fraud to make loans to customers and not report that as debt based on the quality of the customer’s credit. That didn’t change till somewhere around 2006.
Doesn’t make this ethical.
I wouldn’t vote for Carly. I know from friends who worked there at HP exactly what she did to the company. HP used to be like Apple is today, she crushed the company culture, turning it into just another dumb company.
I remember all the empty office buildings and acres and acres of empty parking lots in Holmdel, Middletown, etc. in the early 2000s.
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