Not a Fiorina backer by any means. But I do have knowledge of HP’s problems.
Problem 1) very politicized management, absolutely no entrepreneurial thinking allowed.
Problem 2) Aging work force, it is just not hip to work there.
Combine these two you just stop organic growth as a company. That is why she probably went then M&A route.
BTW this the quoted piece fails to mention the IBM has just reinvented itself again.
Also not her biggest fan by any means but there’s a lot of revisionism going on.
First, following IBM might not have been the right thing anyhow. It’s not like IBM is knocking the cover off the ball now either.
The purchase of Compaq can be rightly criticized since the move to services was more likely to be a better strategic move.
HP’s culture at the time was atrophying and Fiorina spent a lot of time working on bringing a modern competitive feel to it. HP was very patrician and they were losing out on the new technology. The note about raising the number of patents was very telling as HP had fallen into the same trap Xerox did. Xerox senior management failed to capitalize on arguably the greatest invention cycle of the computer era because senior management’s paradigm was photocopying.
HP had a similar internal feel to it and any CEO coming in from the outside would have to fight to evolve it.
In the end, she was not able to transform the company properly but she did seed the culture with the ability to start to accept outside thought and that was not a small thing then.
On balance a negative reign but the long term effects of her efforts were not zero.
I’ll take problem #2 any day. I have not seen much from the younger crowd as far as innovation. I do not call dart boards at work, BS meaningless apps that parrot 1000 other meaningless apps, and dead-end, feel good processes innovation. The generations prior to the last two put men in space, split the atom, created amazing medical devices, and created/improved computers, the last two use those inroads to make video games and Farcebook. They have not had any what I call “hard” achievements by comparison.
She also guided HP through the Tech Meltdown of 2000-01. 30,000 employees is a drop in the bucket compared to the layoffs that occurred at the time within the industry, and is less than other IT companies of comparable size - I can remember IBM firing 10's of thousands of employees at least twice (lived through one of the layoffs....).
Heck, I worked at a completely non-IT manufacturing company, and it laid off 10,000+ people at one shot in 2001 or 2002. The IT dept lost 10% of its workers, in one day. That wasn't any fun.
Frankly, IT never really recovered from the hit that it took in 00-01. Of course, it was ridiculously overblown at the time and needed to be pared back. But it never really recovered from the complete non-event that was Y2K.
And as for her severance package ... HP agreed to it. It's not like she forced them to offer at gunpoint.
I'm not an enormous Fiorina Fan, but smear pieces like this are just wrong.