Carly Fiorina as a boss: The disappointing truth

Carly said "No American has a right to a job."

That includes *her*.

The truth is that HP was struggling long before Carly took the helm and continues to have some difficulties even still, although HP is a very successful and profitable company today where some others didn’t survive those tough years post dot com crash and even some industry insiders give her credit for doing what needed to be done at the time, making some tough choices, even as it was unpopular and ended up with her getting fired.

Carly Fiorina laid groundwork for HP's success

Interesting article from August 2000 – worth a read:

At Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina Combines Discipline, New-Age Talk

My understanding is that HP at the time she took over, it was a lumbering behemoth and with a deeply entrenched culture (the “H-P Way”), or as what I’ve encountered at some companies I’ve worked for when looking to improve efficiencies or solve problems and asking “so why do you do it that way? – and the answer was always “I don’t know why, but that’s just the way we’ve always done things”, one that was not keeping up with rapid changes in the industry and “had splintered into 83 autonomous businesses that had no overarching strategy.”

“Some executives fretted that managers wouldn't wield "real" authority if they couldn't control both product development and marketing."It took some of the glory, if you wish, out of the job," says Mr. Perez, the departed executive.” Product development and marketing have to work closely together but product engineers are not necessarily good at marketing (or sales). “Consternation rippled through the ranks. Managers who had long aspired to run their own autonomous units, known as P&Ls, short for profit & loss, suddenly saw most of those jobs disappear.”

“Most of the units exercised nearly total authority over their budgets, often to the detriment of broader goals.”

Managers were in other words, IMO, running their own autonomous “fiefdoms”; the overall strategy or health of the company or the overall customer experience be damned.

That and all the numerous divisions did not interact with each other or with their customers – “Frustrated customers had long complained that large purchases required them to deal separately with several H-P divisions. So Ms. Fiorina tapped Ann Livermore, who previously ran the server-computer division, to consolidate dealings with the company's top 100 customers.” And that strategy resulted in a very lucrative long term deal with Amazon.com.

“She tore up the company's profit-sharing program in favor of a strict performance-based bonus system.” And I’m sure that pissed a lot of old timers off. I’ve seen this shift happen a few years ago at the company where I currently work. Many people had been accustomed to getting annual increases and bonuses based on the company’s overall performance regardless of their individual performance or their business unit’s performance. It was a big wake up call to some in management and in some business units, who had been coasting and reaping the benefits of other’s success.

Perhaps in hindsight the Compac merger didn’t bring the results that either she or the HP BOD’s wanted, but Carly was specifically hired at HP to “shake things up” and to consolidate all the various and autonomous business units and to position HP to be more competitive in a rapidly changing market and in that, IMO, she succeeded.

Carly said "No American has a right to a job." That includes *her*.

As if she thinks she has a right to a job.

Yep. Place I used to work at was filled with nothing but the finest test equipment out there: HP.

*Poof*. Gone. All for cheap printers and expensive ink, and computers I couldn’t stand.

That “Golden Age of Islam” speech was given two weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center Towers?

(lengthy expletives deleted by poster)

read my tag line

Yeah, “Fortune” is a big-time lefty rag. Their facts may be on-point (if they share ALL of the facts), but their analysis will always, always trash conservatives

Un-"Fortune"-tely, their "facts" have also many errors of omission, and profound misunderstanding of changing printing, communications, networking and storage technology landscape of the time.

For example, she didn't "destroy" Lucent before being begged to save HP from being a market-share-losing printer and disk manufacturing company. Just before coming on board as CEO of HP, Lucent for 2 consecutive years had a 2:1 stock split (i.e., 4x - ironically, on April 1, 1998 and on April 1, 1999 - due to significantly increased LU share price which went from $7.56 to $84 and eventually reached valuation of $258B) and helped set up in motion spinoffs of separate communication companies with multi-billion revenues, Avaya (AV, now private) in early 2000 and — due to 2000-2001 "Internut" bust and 9/11/2001 — delayed spinoff of Agere Systems (AGR.A and AGR.B, later acquired by LSI Logic, which was itself acquired in 2014 by Avago (AVGO), a US-Singaporean semiconductor company.) - Lucent Technologies Inc. flowchart

Fiorina was no more responsible for "destruction" of Lucent (remnants of which were sold to France's Alcatel which is now being acquired by Finland's Nokia) than of Nortel (NT), Tellabs (TLAB), Cisco (CSCO), Juniper Networks (JNPR) and numerous other telcos or CLECs who disappeared from the telecom/networking landscape.

A few months after she joined HP, the company had a major spinoff (approved by the board and previous management prior to Fiorina's input) of the Agilent (A), at the time a $19B IPO, removed from the company's book value and distributed to HP shareholders. Adding that value alone would significantly change the record of her tenure, comparing the stock performance against similar rivals, and that's not even counting the huge value added to combined HP through the merger with Compaq - then a leader in server storage and "portables," with a great end-user and corporate channels.

There had been layoffs at HP, by most counts about 30,000 people, due to redundancies in management and overlapping operations in merged companies, as well as streamlining HP from unmanageable 53 divisions down to 4 and instituting a more channel-friendly policy rather than relying on dying direct-sales policy (IBM and many other big tech companies followed suit). And all that, of course, happening right in the middle of the Internet crash and after 9/11. No surprise that many people didn't like the changes and weren't happy with Fiorina, including the Hewlett siblings who sat on the board while the company had been sinking into irrelevancy, like Xerox and Polaroid. She was, after all, an outsider, not "of HP."

All she did was save it from sliding into oblivion, by restructuring it under extremely difficult economic and political circumstances and with some people on the board constantly standing in her way, while later taking credit for the successes of the restructured HP. Or need we remind how the same board hired "master of disaster" Leo Apotheker after turning blind eye to Mark Hurd's problems?

Sure, she had a lot of unhappy people and enemies. "If you have no enemies, you are not important enough to have made any" - Alexandre Dumas

Ironically, it was the Fortune article that put Fiorina's name on the Big Map:

In 1998, a reporter for Fortune came to Lucent to interview Fiorina for a feature on the most powerful women in business. At the time, Fiorina was president of Lucent's Global Service Provider division. Though her group was responsible for churning out roughly $19 billion in revenue annually, Fiorina wasn't exactly a household name. Yet when the Fortune piece came out, she was ranked in the No. 1 slot — ahead of Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. Fiorina topped the list, Fortune wrote, because she "sells no less than 'the things that make communications work' — big-ticket networking systems and software for telephone, Internet, and wireless-service operators in 43 countries around the globe. In short, she's at the center of the ongoing technology revolution that's changing how we live and work."

After that, recruiters for major companies started calling. The call that intrigued Fiorina most came from Hewlett-Packard. Soon enough, she was the company's new CEO — the first to come from outside HP, and the first female head of a Fortune 20 company.

Also see the post from Carly Fiorina: 'Here's what I will do as Commander in Chief' - FR, post #21, 2015 July 29

And we don’t have flying cars, either.

FAA approve flying car.

And we continue forming the circular firing squad. . .NO candidate is good enough to someone. . so, those someone’s grab their vote and go home.

At least the demoncRATS at least understand unity and small gains. . .with a repub in the WH, the repus controlling Senate and House, the SCOTUS will not be staffed with ACLU types that surely will be if the RATS win the presidency.

When was the last time the repubs owned the WH, Senate and House? Been a heck of a long time. Give them a chance to get it right, at least once, if only to save the SCOTUS (that is what is truly at stake).

Yeah, I was kind of thinking the same thing.

It’s funny to watch Freepers based on hunches and wishful thinking rationalize that Fiorina must have actually been great at HP ...!!

When back when she was fired there were threads where it was all I told you so

Point being

If you’re making money you don’t get fired by your board and typically a CEO has board loyalists to begin with which is part of why a board hires them or approves the hire or promotion

She turned HP upside down and was hard to deal with according to published accounts and lost money

Women are hard to work for generally speaking ...ask any woman.

Female personality makes for issues and drama

Cat ladies might understand me.....the vast bachelor brigade on FR here likely not

In my now 40 plus years in business as employee or owner I’ve dealt with scores of women who had authority over me...usually lenders or govt folks at codes or zoning

Two of them are great.....I’d work for them anyday....exceptional and both are dames

They love and adore men and are not intimidated or pushy....and ones a Yankee

The rest forget it and my wife says same

Homosexuals can be difficult to work for too....same reasons

Petty and drama and indecisive and validation needs

Fiorina is more impressive than me but her HP record is an F

In my working history most any man or women I worked along side of dreaded working for a female boss....just a fact & I’ve been working since I was a kid in the 70s & nothing has changed.

Yessir

My experience and my former Cracker Barrel exec wife’s too

1.she drove HP to its lowest performance ever.
2. she came out of the marketing org, had no operations experience.
3. never won an election in her life/never held public office.
4. Drove the final stake into a brilliant organization in Compaq/DEC -- both had some of the smartest tech innovators (DEC Alpha platform)
5.thinks she is much smarter than she really is.

no way we elect an failed executive who could not win a seat in public office.. Oh and we have not even discussed her positions on illegal immigrantion, cimmon core, bammycare , etc

“It’s funny to watch Freepers based on hunches and wishful thinking rationalize that Fiorina must have actually been great at HP ...!!

When back when she was fired there were threads where it was all I told you so

Point being

If you’re making money you don’t get fired by your board and typically a CEO has board loyalists to begin with which is part of why a board hires them or approves the hire or promotion”

Even her loyalists on the HP board deserted her.

“Fiorina is more impressive than me but her HP record is an F”

A disaster.

Carly seems to evoke strong emotions one way or another. Folks seem to love her or hate her.

Thanks for adding some balance.