Posted on 11/05/2009 7:39:45 PM PST by El Gringo
California Republican Execs have a chance to redeem themselves ...
After two serious fumbles: 1. Teresa Hernandez for Congressional District 32, May 2009, and 2. David Harmer for Congressional District 10, November 2009. How can they shed their Keystone Cops image? Answer: Follow the Jim deMint lead and support Chuck DeVore to replace senator Boxer. Do not support Carly Fiorina, she is the poster girl of affirmative action. The Board at Hewlett Packard (mostly heirs of Wm. Hewlett and David Packard) soon discovered she was unsuitable, because rather than build on HP strengths, she sought to expand via acquisition, mostly in areas where HP had no strengths. Eventually the Board was able to bring about Fiorina’s resignation. Read the sad stories of Hernandez and Harmer: Click here...
I wasn’t working there at the time, but alot of my friends were and we used to do lunch with people from HP all the time.
Before Carly, HP was like a golden flower of the valley.
The things they were coming out with were hot and the culture was one of free invention. HP didn’t hit the skids till she joined and then everything hit the skids.
Then they got into trouble and had to layoff tons of people and started on the acquisition path.
HP never was big into Manufacturing, they tended to outsource everything. We went to a seminar on the HP Campus prior to Carly, Called the HP Way about how they handled the business.
Carly crashed the party, I never could understand how she came there in the first place. Everyone said she was there due to affirmative action, they needed a woman CEO and therefore passed up others that had the finely ingrained HP Culture.
Bottom line, opinion was that she was there as a product of affirmative action and political correctness of the board. She was an outsider that didn’t know how HP worked, and therefore destroyed the company.
Since I didn’t work there, I can only tell you how fierce the people who did felt about this.
Many years ago, I heard lots of bad things about Fiornino from HP employees. I live in the Silicon Valley.
I hope she isn’t the republican nominee.
That is what I heard from HP employees. She did not appreciate the HP culture at all. If she made tons of money, one could argue that they needed a culture change. However, that is not what happened.
Oh, one more thing, She has about 80k serious detractors in the valley. I would think this would hurt her chances of ever winning the governership.
If she wins the nomination, these people are going to come out of the woodwork and I think there will be a meltdown in the polls.
They were making money, they just wanted to make more (greed) and they wanted to be political correct (affirmative action).
There were 3 other better qualified HP candidates for her job that were passed over because they were white males.
She took them from making money to loosing it.
I have two friends who worked for HP, starting before Carly, and bailing out because of Carly. They hate Carly Fiorina with a passion.
I have the same faith that you do in the leadership of the CA GOP. A bigger crowd of unprincipled, politically correct opportunists would be hard to find.
If not for Fiorina HP would have turned out to be GM.
It was a bloated heavy company with weak product lines.
I have friends at HP who are glad to keep their jobs thanks to changes Fiorina did and the company is in to shape.
Of course some who thought they had a job for ever at HP were disappointed at losing it, this is not a Govt career.
Please show me the long list of Conservative statewide office holders in California.
That was after her. They had a model of out sourcing, bloated product lines didn’t exist till Carly duplicated 80% of the company with the Compaq merger. I have talked to hundreds of hp workers. She was hated beyond belief.
Workers didnlt have to worry about large layoffs because they outsourced so much. They would design it and someone else made it. If it failed, the supplier was the one who had the layoffs.
The only thing they kept in house was the printers where they dominated the market with huge margins. Now where are they? Still trying to recover.
All the information is on the net. They hate her along with some very powerful enemies.
The issue with many Tech workers is that they think they are entitled to a job for ever because they can cut some good code or good at what they do.
The issue props up whenever a big company announces layoffs and outsourcing and the workers hate it. IBM does it frequently and still in pretty good shape even under this economy.
Outsourcing is a reality and techies cannot escape.
Before Fiorina, HP was nothing more than a leader in printers. Under her leadership , it over took Dell in pc sales and more importantly in the corporate sales segment. It diversified in to IT consulting, services etc and it becomae a bigger better company.
A good CEO is not their to be liked or loved, she is there to steer and position the company so that it can take advantage of the market opportunites which she did.
No, your wrong
Most tech companies layoff routinely.
HP was the exception, not the rule.
They had come up with a special recipe with the right culture.
Listen dude, you are in the tank for Carly.
She is a stinking turd, if you can’t take it, then read a different thread.
But your defense of her is grating without any facts. Tech companies lay off all the time.
There have only been 3 of them that haven’t.
You could say programers demand a high salery and a relaxed working enviroment. But you can’t say they are like a tenured govenment employee.
The average guy goes through 4 companies in one year in the valley.
Most of the HP employees weren’t programmers. They were everything from Admin, product management, supply chain, tech workers, engineers, etc.... programmers were a very small part. HP isn’t and wasn’t a software company.
She is a big ol stink bomb getting ready to go off in the GOP’s lap.
If not for hard decisions under Fiorina, HP would’nt be in the comfort zone that it is in.
The important thing is CEO takes the tough decisions which are not popular with a entrenched bloated workforce but necessary for the company to survive.
Of course some are not going to like it ( ex HP employees) but that is the reality of a open economy.
1999 -> 2005
Check the stock chart, look at how it took off when she was fired.
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:HP
And don’t miss the fact that the stock split before she got hired.
thennnnn....................nothing
Listen dude, you didn’t work for HP nor you have dealt with the company.
All you are doing is complaining here without any experience of how top companies work and the competitive factors in the tech industry.
There are many HP employees happy to keep their job and not follow the footsteps of General Motors.
There are legions of American tech workers who have not accepted the reality of outsourcing and just whinge and whine about it.
Compare to ‘what is name’ Chuck devore and his guaranteed landslide defeat, I am glad to support a qualified women for the senate seat.
You might be wrong about that and may be very shocked. I have been around the block more than once.
HP acquired EDS years after Fiorina suggested the same.
After they fired her, No one said buying companies is a bad strategy. It was a strategy that HP did adopt from her.
But note this ...
“After years of rebuilding, of returning to dominance in the personal computing market, of restoring financial performance, of sorting through boardroom battles and scandals and post-merger bitterness, HP is back where it started.”
That was all caused by her.
Just because someone brought one thing good to the company, it doesn’t undo the harm.
Anyone could have told HP go and buy companies, only she would by a company that duplicated 80% of the company and put Dell on top for years.
The only one that thought this was a good strategy for HP, was Dell. They were laughing and laughing. This was like mana from heaven.
She is a turd.
You have missed out the point of the article.
She was blasted for suggesting HP should buy a services company 8 years ago, the HP culture and investors hated it.
She was detested by the HP workforce for buying compaq which was the main cause of criticism .
Also note that in article how companies struggle to merge when the workforce culture is so different. but no one can deny that HP and Compaq merger was a successful merger and the CEO should take the credit.
It is also clear the closed culture at HP has changed and come to adopted Fiorina’s strategy 8 years after she was criticised for it, this shows she is visionary and a good leader.
She wasn’t detested for that, she was detested because she purchased 100% of a company with 80% duplication just to get the 20%.
This meant that HP had to lay off and merge all this duplication in order to just get this 20% when they could have purchased just the business they needed without all the rest.
They hated her for stupidity.
Compaq Servers is what they wanted along with the services that went with them — oh, this is a duplication, but not in Carly’s eyes. Some employees argued it was 100% duplication because HP had a server business, but it had weak penetration.
Everything else would either be killed on the Compaq or the HP Side. Entire divisions of both Compaq to find they were being completely shut down because the other division in the merger was being retained while they are being shut down.
It was a bloody massacre. In the mean time 1+1 didn’t = 2, it didn’t even equal 1, it ended up being 1 + 1 = .4, thats right. They didn’t even maintain market share.
Complete unmitigated disaster.
Took them years to clean up the mess.
I will say one thing, the board was very dysfunctional.
There is a chance that some of the failure of Carly was due to the board.
She definitely owned it though, she presented everything as her plan etc..
But there is always a chance that there was a puppet master behind the curtain. If she was the one just serving the turds and not making them.
I would feel better. But to date, she has not made that argument.
If she did become governor, that would be a good character in a leader. Very unlike Obama that doesn’t take responsibility for anything, it is all bush’s fault.
This is like threading a needle though, I don’t think she will make it.
She destroyed Lucent even more than HP. HP should have seen what she did to Lucent and never hired her.
The board proposed a plan to shift her authority to HP division heads, which Fiorina resisted. A week after the meeting, the confidential plan was leaked to the Wall Street Journal.
Less than a month later, board brought back in Tom Perkins and forced Fiorina to resign as chairman and chief executive officer of the company.
The company's stock jumped on news of Fiorina's departure. Under the company's agreement with Fiorina which was characterized as a golden parachute by some, she was paid slightly more than twenty million dollars in severance.
When Fiorina became CEO in July, 1999, HP's stock price was $52 per share, and when she left 5 years later in February, 2005, it was $21 per share—a loss of over 60% of the stock's value. During this same time period, HP competitor Dell's stock price increased from $37 to $40 per share.
Yes, I was in that industry.
I don’t know if it was crystal clear it was all her fault. HP was.
To me, it was ok for HP to give her another shot, just not as CEO. She shouldn’t have been selected over the better qualified internal candidates.
Don’t forget that Beautiful stock split right before she was hired. Everyone doubled their money.
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