“Newsflash! “Evil Republican CEO’s at HP trying to hurt Obama’s job numbers.. Film at 11.”
GWG....You may be correct but I put the blame solely on CEO incompetence not politics. The company has had a string of self serving incompetent CEO’s. HP had a long term history of being a profitable stable company, producing a quality product in the USA, and a reputation for being a good employer that paid well and rarely laid off. Then Carly Fiorina came along. The coincidence is that both Fiorina and Whitman (current CEO) personally dislike each other even as failed political candidates.
Friends that have worked at both HP and Lucent hate her guts and claim that her ego, arrogance and incompetent decisions screwed up both corporations. Even the founders of HP fought her decisions.
The latest by Leo Apotheker resulted in their Touch pad fiasco. It is disturbing to me that shareholders and employees pay big prices while these loser CEOs have walked away with the gold. They should not be paid for failure. They should be required to face personal liability for mismanagement.
I survived Carly’s “Some of us won’t be here to complete the journey”. Her carry-over from Lucent was to introduce “forced ranking”, meaning to take whatever organization and tell the managers to fit the total into six sigma. Now by definition you have 10% of your organization in the “unacceptable” performance band. As such you can write into their FPR’s (performance review) the unacceptable rating.
All that’s left is to deny said individual a means to remedy it (no training available, no opportunities without relocation, etc) and you can with a clear conscience move said individual to WFR (work force reduction) status. And the best part is you can repeat this process with the remaining workforce.
Her understudy (I forget her name) did the same thing during her brief tenure as CEO(? or close to it) at Kodak.
Bill and Dave are rolling in their graves. Carly sold off the best part of the business (Test & Measurement), killed RISC microprocessors, and let Compaq take over HP.
I once heard that she had degrees in business and history. Her mission was to make HP’s business history. Once HP surpassed IBM in annual sales they started telling customers how they would deliver services. The arrogance didn’t have its’ anticipated appeal.
At any rate, I’m off to bed now. I am doing well supporting much of the same base as before. The one-on-one relationship is still valued. G’night all.