Posted on 08/16/2015 11:14:00 AM PDT by jimbo123
She’s running for President on her track record as CEO of HP, but if that’s the case, Fiorina might want to rethink her strategy.
-snip-
Still, with a scant 5% of Fortune 500 firms employing women CEOs, her leadership of a huge global enterprise in the macho field of IT is impressive. But how did she do?
The answer in short is: Pretty badly.
In 1999, a dysfunctional HP board committee, filled with its own poisoned politics, hired her with no CEO experience, nor interviews with the full board. Fired in 2005, after six years in office, several leading publications titled her one of the worst technology CEOs of all time. In fact, the stock popped 10% on the news of her firing and closed the day up 7%.
Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP’s founder, commented when discouraging voters from supporting Fiorina in her 2010 senatorial run, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”
However, before Conservative Political Action Caucus in February, Fiorina proclaimed that under her HP command, “We would double its revenues to $90 billion, triple its rate of innovation to 11 patents a day, and go from a laggard to a leader in every product category and every market segment in which we competed.”
Sure, she doubled revenues—through a massive, ill-conceived, controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002—but Fiorina did nothing to increase profits over her five-year term, with the S&P 500 showing net income across enterprises concomitantly up 70%. Furthermore, shareholder wealth at HP was sliced 52% under her reign against the S&P, which was down only 15% in that bearish period. She modeled the old joke of “making it up in the volume.”
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
Is this what you're referring to? If so, her "part" was participating in a panel discussion, and her contributions were "The commitments to the Clinton Foundation come from the The National Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which has agreed to put $3.7 million toward creating “an exhibition space near the National Mall in Washington, DC to celebrate entrepreneurship and innovation in America” and “programs to reach 50,000 youth with in-person experiences that foster interest in entrepreneurship,” and Good 360, which partnered with Hilton Worldwide in “finding alternative ways to recycle, donate, or reuse waste instead of sending it to the landfill” for a $2 million commitment."
She was never on my radar screen. I’ve never thought much of her at all. The after debate comment just sealed the deal further for me.
Interesting thread.
Fiorina is an affirmative action failure. A woman with a liberal arts degree from Stahn-Ford who keeps failing upward, which is the only way you can go in a company if you’re a she, not a he.
H-P used to have a reputation that was bullet proof, and the equipment was always the best - just a matter of whether you wanted to pay for it.
They took only the top 2% or so of Engineering school grads. You couldn’t even get an interview if you weren’t in that cohort.
She took the Instrument part of the business and stripped it of its brand name which was the most valuable in the world. “Agilent” doesn’t really hold much heft against “National Instruments”, but H-P did. You knew who the heavy weight was.
She destroyed that and pasted the H-P name on a crapware mass produced clone. There might be some marketing cleverness to that but it took a long time to live down the Compaq name. H-P could have just built their own right from the start, there was no heavy engineering to do. They had a lot of make up work on bringing the Compaq junk up to standards. The originals were a just a bit beyond the Gateway trash.
So while she may be well spoken, she had no business being where she was.
As an Engineer in the Valley I know a fair number of H-P alumni. Not one has a good word for her and all of them are some of the best electron chasers I ever met.
Maybe she’s got a sharp tongue. Don’t mean nuffin’ if ya don’t understand whatcha got, how to sell it, and especially how to develop it.
We have a close friend who worked under her. She is not what she appears. He is a very gracious guy, and not one to criticize, but he would NOT vote for her.
1999 to 2005 was a very tough time to be in high tech. A lot of companies went out of business. H-P didn’t.
Also wasn’t there a couple of airplanes in 2001 that pretty much trashed the economy over that period?
I remember it well just in the hotel business. We immediately lost 60% of our business. Dot.com bubble burst didn’t help either.
My guess is considering what I know is she overstates her personal networking accomplishments. Her so called close friendships with foreign leaders. Those never registered to me to be quite on the level.
She destroyed Lucent and damn near destroyed HP.
1. "hired her with no CEO experience"
She was the President of and running a very successful $19B division (that's larger than many S&P 500 companies) of Lucent at the time HP begged her to turn around an aging, drifting company with legacy businesses and dozens of mostly independently run divisions whose products were being commoditized and margins shrinking, with several competitors gaining market share. Without major restructuring and change of direction, HP was going the way of Kodak, Polaroid and Xerox. Far from "destroying" HP, Fiorina's actions saved it.
2. Yes, there were thousands of layoffs - partially because of merger with Compaq, partially because of consolidations of divisions and eliminating of internal redundancies and dealing with the aftermaths of the "dotcom" bust and 9/11, just like there were in most other companies, for those who still remember.
At last count, there are more than 300,000 employees at HP today, with the revenue per employee of about $355K and profit per employee of about $15K - does that mean company is successful, unsuccessful, or these numbers, in isolation, are meaningless?
Hint: don't ask Fortune to give you the answer. But note that the price of HPQ stock is at about the same level that was 10 years ago, when Fiorina was "fired" by the dysfunctional board.
BTW, while the stock coasted up for a while as a result of her restructuring, both CEOs who followed Fiorina were also fired by the dysfunctional board — Mark Hurd "for cause" and Leo Apotheker who lasted barely 1 year on the job and really wrecked the company with mindless acquisition of Autonomy for $11B which had to be entirely written off, and cutting several promising product research projects. Oh, and two members of the dysfunctional board have resigned a year after firing Fiorina because they were implicated in a massive scandal of leaking confidential company information.
3. Fortune article omits and/or distorts financial performance of Lucent and HP by selective irrelevant comparisons. You can find more, better facts in this post: Carly Fiorina as a boss: The disappointing truth - FR, post #26, 2015 August 15 Fortune
I am not relying on personal experience from friends at both places. I have not read the article you linked
great post. thanks
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