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The six-hour Republican conclave here is (finally) over and we have all the details over at our premium site and in the printed paper Saturday. Some highlights and leftovers that didn’t make the main story: Yes, the news early in the day was that Donald Trump bailed at the last minute, but judging purely from audience reaction, the 10,000 activists here for the Heritage Action Presidential Forum were equally enamored of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former CEO Carly Fiorina. Cruz got the warmest welcome when introduced while Fiorina left the stage to thunderous applause. Cruz was clearly more relaxed...

A comparison of the tenures is a battle of bad vs. worse. It’s well known by now that GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina has never held political office and is running on her business record. As many commentators have pointed out, that’s a dicey proposition since her highest-profile job as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005 was sort of a disaster.But in an interview with Fortune contributor and Yale School of Management professor Jeffery Sonnenfeld, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump—who has made a habit of criticizing Fiorina—took aim at a different stage of her career.When asked about what he thought...

Carly Fiorina: By the time the board pushed her out in 2005, Fiorina’s $25 billion acquisition of Compaq was considered a flop — and H-P recently essentially undid the deal. (More on that later.) The company’s earnings withered during her rocky tenure, falling to $1.16 a share in her final full year in 2004 from $1.54 a share in 1999, when she was named CEO. True, 1999 was the height of the Internet technology boom and 2004 was a time when businesses were recovering from the dotcom meltdown and a recession. During Fiorina’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate run last year, Fiorina’s...

Fiorina did run Hewlett-Packard during a tough time. But even compared to rivals, her tenure was unimpressive. Carly Fiorina has taken a lot of heat over her business record. But evaluating her performance is more complicated than it seems. Shares of Hewlett-Packard, the tech giant she ran from 1999 to 2005, fell 45% during her tenure, and she was thrown out as CEO. That doesn’t sound great. During Wednesday evening’s Republican debate, she tried to blunt some of that criticism with context. Basically, Fiorina said you have to look at what was going on at the time, and that’s a...

Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, is running for president on her business smarts. She led the company from 1999 to 2005, the first female head of a Fortune 50 firm — and controversies from her high-profile tenure resurfaced Wednesday at the Republican debate. "Yes, we had to make tough choices," Fiorina said on the prime-time stage, "and in doing so, we saved 80,000 jobs, went on to grow to 160,000 jobs. And now Hewlett-Packard is almost 300,000 jobs. We went from lagging behind to leading in every product category and every market segment." "The company is a...

With Fiorina as chairman and CEO, Hewlett-Packard's value declined significantly and the technology giant endured massive layoffs. Fiorina led a largely unsuccessful merger with Compaq in 2002, going against the wishes of company founder Walter Hewlett. Asked by the board of directors to step down in 2005, Fiorina left with $21 million in cash, plus stock and pension benefits worth another $19 million. According to HP executive compensation rules, departing executives are entitled to no more than 2.99 times their base salary; anything more requires stockholder approval. Fiorina's parachute was more than that, so the stockholders filed a class action...

Carleton S. Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, will receive a severance package worth about $21.4 million, and stands to gain at least $21.1 million more. The additional amount reflects the estimated value of her pension, stock options and Hewlett stock holdings, which the company did not include in her severance package. Ms. Fiorina was forced to resign Tuesday after the board concluded that she failed to reverse Hewlett's sagging stock price and accelerate the company's turnaround after the merger with Compaq Computer. She will receive $14 million in severance pay, or two and a half times her 2004...

Donald Trump couldn't resist the opportunity on Thursday to knock businesswoman Carly Fiorina during a campaign stop in New Hampshire. "I thought I'd wait a couple of days before I expose her business failure," Trump said. "But honestly, it's so ridiculous." But Halyna Sorensen's question during a town hall-style event that drew 3,000 people was too perfect for Trump to turn down, sending Trump spiraling into the latest iteration of his criticism of Fiorina's controversial business record -- not just at Hewlett-Packard, but at a lesser-known technology company called Lucent. Sorensen, 66, was a Lucent employee when Fiorina took over...

From time to time as the 2016 campaign unfolds we will publish here the full text of some candidate speeches on important topics. We launch this series with Carly Fiorina's national security address at the Reagan Presidential Library the evening of July 27. The full text is below, as is a complete video... You'll notice here — and hopefully in the upcoming debates — that the business executive speaks in clear, simple declarative sentences. No fudge words or rhetorical escape clauses. Clean, crisp, no nonsense. She outlines the problem, then states clearly what she would do. That style drew frequent...

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. Fresh from strong debate quips, Carly Fiorina has improbably raced from 14th to fifth place in the New Hampshire Republican primary polls and now enjoys a 70% favorability rating in Iowa, ahead of such career politicians as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, George Pataki, and Lindsay Graham. It is time to take her candidacy seriously and examine her leadership record. Having never held elected office, she has staked her...

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...

Earlier this week, someone who had read my piece about Donald Trump’s less-than-A+ record in business asked me if I’d write something about Carly Fiorina’s business record and why I think despite Democratic and Trumpette knocks on it, it actually indicates that she would do a good job as President (full disclosure: I have worked with and consulted for Carly Fiorina in the past). With that in mind, here goes nothing.First, let’s start broad brush, with the basic recognition that Carly Fiorina is a self-made woman. Unlike Trump, she comes from a family of academic types, not business people—let alone...

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